Website SEO: Why you should update your website regularly
Most modern businesses have a website that operates as a digital storefront for products and services. After you choose one of the best website builders to create your company site, it’s important to regularly update and maintain it in order to maximize your visibility, and ensure that your website SEO (search engine optimization) is up to date.
It may seem like another irritating task on your business’ to-do list, but ensuring your website is regularly updated has many benefits for growth and will save time, and often money, in the long run.
Customer perception of your brand
Regularly updating website content not only ensures that your offerings are fresh, but also establishes your company’s authority in the marketplace. By regularly auditing and updating your blog posts, web pages, and other online content, you can finetune the effectiveness of your company message, and improve website SEO.
Regular updating also gives you the opportunity to check that any calls to action and lead magnets are performing well, and to remove anything that is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose or is outdated. Our guide on how to write a blog post with optimal SEO might prove helpful when it comes to producing your own blog content.
Another thing to note is that a consistent stream of updates signals to both current customers and potential new ones that the business is active, and ready to take orders or provide services.
Website SEO boost
SEO is always changing, and it is reported that Google changes its algorithms up to 600 times a year. By regularly updating the content on a website, and measuring the impact that slight changes make to organic traffic and search engine visibility, you can ensure that your website is optimized at all times.
It’s also a good idea to make updating and checking your website SEO rankings a regular business habit. This will help save time and reduce costs, as you’ll regularly perform small actions that could easily become much larger tasks later on.
Activities such as cleaning up broken links will give an almost instant boost to your search engine ranking and domain authority – factors that directly affect where your website appears in search engine results.
Having an ongoing grasp of your website’s SEO status also allows you to set goals and marketing metrics, providing greater clarity and control over how your site is performing. And by keeping on top of your digital analytics, you can identify high-performing visitor entry points and strategically plan ways to maximize these to drive more traffic: and, as a result, increase website conversions.
Another factor to consider is your web hosting provider – read our article, does web hosting affect SEO?, to learn more; or take on the advice in our list of the 5 web hosting factors that can affect the SEO of your website.
Improved user experience (UX)
Updating your website regularly provides potential customers with a better user experience. Any issues that arise with browser updates will be easy to identify when a site is regularly checked. This then means that smaller adjustments can be made quickly without the need to invest in a larger, more expensive, redesign later.
The loading speed of a website should also be monitored routinely. While customers are drawn to visually appealing websites, if these take a long time to load content, they will become frustrated, and this can impact sales directly.
Regularly reviewing your website’s landing pages and checking against analytics will help you to identify areas that have high user exit rates. This data can provide information on what isn’t capturing a potential customer’s interest, and provide clues on how to keep them on the site longer, so they may be pushed through the sales funnel to the purchase point.
Social media content
You can also use your website updates as marketing collateral for social media platforms. When you share a consistent stream of informative blog posts or new product launches to these wider audiences, you can quickly add more authority to your business, and provide a call to action for individuals to visit your website.
Security
Keeping a close eye on your website’s framework can also protect and prevent a website from experiencing any security issues, such as hacks.
If you check the security and permissions of your website, and audit your website content periodically, you have a greater chance of catching any vulnerabilities before they are exposed.
While checking these things alone won’t be able to identify every potential threat or hack, it greatly diminishes the likelihood of any security breaches to your website.
Conclusion
For any business looking to drive growth and ensure it has the best digital presence possible, regularly updating its website’s content and infrastructure is essential.
Creating new content doesn’t need to be time-consuming or cost much, either. Done correctly, it can be a cheap and easy way to generate more sales, build a stronger relationship with the customer base, and identify any changes and trends ahead of competitors. Our feature, 6 ways to get free website content for your site legally and without fuss, explores how you can source free, legal, and quality content for sites.