5 Good Reasons to Update your Website
If you're like most small business owners, you probably think of your website as a static entity: something that's mostly finished when it goes live and only requires minor tweaks and updates from thereon out. But the reality is quite different. To make the most of your website and ensure it's working hard for your business day and night, it's important to keep it up-to-date and reflective of the best practices and consumer expectations of the day.
Updating your website on a regular basis provides a number of tangible benefits for your business, including giving you a space to promote your latest and greatest, helping you make a good first impression on new site visitors, improved search engine ranking, increased traffic, and more engaged visitors. Let's take a closer look at each below.
1. Promote Your Latest Offers and Services
Keeping your website content updated is one of the simplest and most effective ways to let your visitors know about your latest offers and services. You want to make sure that any big wins you've recently had or special promotions you're currently running are front and centre. Think banners, pop-ups, and attention-grabbing graphics that are hard for a site visitor to miss.
If someone comes to your site and finds that all the information is out of date, they're going to make certain assumptions. And that's not good. They may think that the site is abandoned and that you've gone out of business, that you're not very on top of things, or that you just don't care. Not a good look.
Update your website any time you've finished work on a big project (add it to your portfolio, client carousel, or testimonials page) or any time you're running a promotion (for a new product or service, event, or holiday). You'll be glad you did, and so will your customers!
2. Make a Good First Impression
One of the best reasons to update your website is to keep it looking fresh and up-to-date.
A website that looks outdated can make your business look unprofessional, so it's important to keep it updated with the latest design trends and technologies. This makes your website look better and helps keep your visitors engaged, removing any technological roadblocks they might have to connect with your content. It also gives you an avenue to demonstrate to your customers that you're invested in your business and are a totally cool, good-looking, and trustworthy professional. 😉
This is especially important if you want people to view you as an authority in your field. A clean, modern-looking site will show site visitors that you are knowledgeable about what’s happening in your industry and leave them with a good first impression of you as a businessperson.
A caveat, though—don't fall down a site-must-look-as-trendy-as-possible rabbit hole that involves an endless search for the "perfect" template to best encapsulate your mantra, life's purpose, all of your likes and dislikes, all of your hopes and dreams and hint at your favourite flavour of ice cream all at once. It doesn't exist. Just let that go. Done is better than perfect, always.
3. Improve Your Website's Search Engine Ranking
Another excellent reason to update your website is to improve your website's search engine ranking. By regularly adding new content and keeping your website updated with the latest search engine optimization techniques, you can help ensure that your website appears higher on search engine results pages. And as we all know, high rankings in search engines can equate to more traffic and higher conversions for your product or service offerings.
The reason this is effective is that in order to find relevant results for search queries, Google crawls all over the internet like a giant, fat-bellied, creepy, monopolistic spider looking for signs that your site is giving searchers what they are hoping to find. Fresh content makes the hungry Google spider happy. Sorry, that's a mildly unpleasant analogy, but let's just go with it, shall we? When the hungry spider comes to a site that is out of date, doesn't have a lot of content, or hasn't been updated in a while—it sighs, shrugs its little spider shoulders and says, "whelp, nothing to see here," before moving on to the next site to crawl all over. In short, it ignores you. Not what you want. You want to serve up a buffet of fresh content, tweaks and updates—and other signs of life and activity on your site to make search engines happy.
This leads us to...
4. Increase Traffic to Your Website with Fresh Content
One of the main benefits of keeping your website updated is that you can see a significant increase in traffic to your website as a result. This is because when you have new content on your website, it will be indexed by search engines more quickly, and as a result, it will show up on search engine results pages more often.
Keeping search engines happy improves your ranking, which makes it easier for people to find you, and if more people can find you, more people will visit your site, and if more people visit your site, the more the search engines will think that you must be on to something, and the more it seems like you're on to something, the more they'll drive traffic to your site...you get the picture.
Keep in mind that "fresh" doesn't necessarily mean that you have to aim to produce a ridiculously high volume of blog posts each week just to stay competitive. There's a lot of internet advice that encourages you to post daily—but that level of volume isn't really sustainable if you have a small team. Post thoughtfully instead. Look for old posts you can update to add new information and maintain a consistent posting schedule. You could also make simple updates by adding a new testimonial, photo, or product to your site pages. These small tweaks can add up and show those weird search engine spiders some solid vital signs.
5. Keep Visitors Engaged and Coming Back for More!
Your competition is always working to stay ahead of the curve, so you need to do the same. If you want to set your business apart from the competition, it’s important to have relevant and engaging content on your website. By regularly updating your site with the tips above, you'll ensure that you're offering visitors the latest and greatest features, designs, and content and will see higher engagement. This is because when you have new and interesting content on your website, it will be more likely to hold their attention. This can lead to increased loyalty from your customers and, ultimately, more sales.
Updating your site can be as simple as changing the featured image each quarter, adding a pop-up to promote a sale, or posting something to your blog, or can be part of a more in-depth strategy that includes split testing colours, images, and text or playing around with the placement of buttons and CTAs to figure out what works best for you and your audience. No matter which approaches you take, the longer your site's been around, and the more often you interact with it—the more likely it is to bring you traffic and land you new customers.