When is it Time to Update Your Website

When is it Time to Update Your Website

We get this question all the time! A business website is your favorite sales tool and often the most neglected. If you follow this useful calendar of updates and changes, your website will remain dynamic and serve you well for years to come.

Every prospective client wants to know if they could do a blog a quarter and are shocked at our answer is once a week. Websites lose page rank every day they are not fed. Each day a competitor could be updating their site and getting more eyeballs than your site. The changes do not have to be big, just consistent and frequent. Working from a content calendar makes this achievable. If you have themes for the week or month, it makes this task even easier. Look at your service lines or offerings and use them as themes. Success!!

Analytics can tell you so much! Your developer should have attached Google Analytics at the launch time for your website. If you had an existing site, they should have transferred the account over to your new site. With a specific list of data points that you collect monthly, you can make adjustments and tweaks to content and images as need be. We always recommend that you add data point only if you can garner an insight, not just to have a lot of data. One client wanted to know the bounce rate to see if a certain landing page was getting read. We recorded how long it took to read the page and then reviewed the data point to compare that to our known timing. This helped them immeasurably. If you do your updates monthly this is a quick task. We suggest keeping a log on your content calendar so you can reference back when you did certain updates.

With you changing your site on a weekly and monthly basis, it’s important to have a search engine review every quarter. If you are current, there will not be much to do. Remember Google loves sites that are fine tuned and updated. We have clients that update sentences at specific intervals just to keep Google on its toes! It works. Being consistent and current is what greatly affects your page rank! This could be adjusting and adding alt tags to images that were missed, adding a sentence here or there or a new person to the staff page. All will be helpful in the long run.

This is the one that stops everyone in their tracks. Change the backend and front end every two or three years. Your business changes daily, prices change, staff, your services, and offerings. Technology can change dramatically in two or three years. The best thing that you can do is be on a solid platform with a flexible and well supported theme. We have the ability to make major changes with the support of the platform and theme with easy and the UI experience completely updates. Andrea Obston of Andrea Obston Marketing Communications says, “We love the ability to collaborate with Nurenu to make major updates on our site to provide a fresh design and it’s well aligned to our current business model.” Great to keep current and updated in a timely manner.