Discover how to update your content easily and quickly. A stale website doesn’t just cause customers to look elsewhere. It can also lead to lower search rankings.
Website stagnation affects your business in several ways.
From the customer’s perspective, a stagnant website is an uninteresting one. If you’re not serving up new content, you’re giving people no reason to revisit your site. Fewer revisits mean fewer opportunities to sell your product. Ultimately, your out-of-date website ends up costing revenue.
Worse yet, search engines pay attention to your content.
If you haven’t updated your website’s content for months, you’re likely to see your rankings fall.
Why?
Search engines rank fresh and valuable content.
Your content may be valuable. But if it isn’t fresh, you give search engines no reason to rank your site above those making the effort to stay up-to-date.
Simply put, you have to keep your website updated. Here, we will show you a few ways to do that. But before we do, let’s dig a little deeper into why you can’t let your website grow stale.
Why You Have to Update Your Website
We’ve covered the basics in terms of delivering fresh content and maintaining or improving, your search engine rankings.
But those are far from the only reasons to keep your website up-to-date.
Reason No. 1 – Ensuring Visual Appeal
Consider your website’s visual appeal.
Think back to the websites created at the start of the dot-com boom. Many of them were eyesores that had strange colour schemes and weird fonts. Most used basic HTML. They had simple structures and, if you were lucky, very basic search functionality.
But we accepted them.
And the reason we accepted them is that that was what website design was at the time. It was the Wild West, where companies were just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck.
As we went deeper into the 2000s, website design evolved. New technologies emerged and the companies that didn’t update their site fell behind. It’s been the same story ever since. We see new design concepts and development technologies get thrown into the mix every year. If you’re not updating your website to incorporate these new concepts, you end up with something that looks stale and dated.
The result?
Potential customers take one look and decide to buy elsewhere. After all, if you’re not going to make the effort with your website, who’s to say you’ll make an effort with your product.
Reason No. 2 – Making Your Website Faster
Almost half of internet users expect your website to load in two seconds or less.
If it doesn’t, most of those people will go elsewhere because they assume that navigating through your website will be a chore.
Speed is of the essence when it comes to website design. If you’re not constantly updating your site to make it more efficient and achieve optimal loading speeds, you’re giving visitors a reason to go elsewhere.
Thankfully, Automation Agency can help you with your page loading speeds. Send a message to our Concierge Service to find out how.
Reason No. 3 – Delivering Accurate Content
We all want to create evergreen content.
We all want to believe that the content we place on our websites can last forever. And in some rare cases, it can.
But most content doesn’t last forever.
At some point, the information you share becomes outdated for many reasons. Perhaps the stats you use in an article are from several years ago. Maybe you’ve introduced new product lines that confront issues discussed in previous content. Or, the content itself no longer reflects your organisation’s values.
Whatever the case may be, your content becomes less accurate as it ages. That means it also becomes less valuable to your visitors. By keeping your content up-to-date, you ensure that your visitors get a more accurate representation of your business.
How to Keep Your Website Updated
We’ve looked at why keeping your website up to date is so important. Now, we have to think about how you’re doing it. Thankfully, there are plenty of techniques that can help you. Some are more effort-intensive than others. But all combine to ensure you create a website that offers what your potential customers expect.
Technique No. 1 – Create a Content Calendar
People come to your website for content.
Of course, they want general information about what you do, what services you offer, and how you can help them with their problems.
But they also want to see photos, images, blog posts, videos, and anything else that allows them to dig deeper into your services of the challenges they want to overcome.
That means you’ve got to ensure that a steady stream of fresh content is added to your website.
This task can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re struggling to develop ideas. That’s why creating a content calendar can help you to keep your website up-to-date.
A content calendar can be as simple as an Excel sheet that lists the various types of content and topics you’ll cover, for each day of the month. Or, it can be something more complicated that you create using WordPress plugins that provide alerts and notifications to keep you on track.
The point is that you need a calendar to give you a content schedule. Your calendar is also where you record ideas that you want to build on, ensuring you don’t forget about topics you want to cover when you’re absorbed in the day-to-day running of your business.
Technique No. 2 – Revisit Old Content
Earlier, we mentioned that content can become outdated if it includes old stats or tips that are no longer relevant to the end-user.
Thankfully, what’s old can be made new again.
You don’t have to discard outdated content entirely. The odds are that there’s still plenty of useful and relevant information in your past articles. Spending a few minutes getting new stats and updating old ideas means you give the content a fresh coat of paint.
What happens then?
You can republish it with a title that clarifies that the content is updated for the current year. Your website gets a new piece and you get to spend less effort on providing value to your visitors.
But what if a piece doesn’t need updating. Yes, it’s old. But the information in it is still as relevant as ever.
That’s okay!
You can repurpose the old content into something new. For example, let’s say you have an article that walks people through the basics of making a recipe. That article is a prime candidate for being turned into a how-to video that you can publish on your website or social media. Or, you might be able to create an infographic that covers the steps while adding a fresh visual appeal to the piece.
If you can’t refresh your content, think about ways you can repurpose it. Again, Automation Agency can help you with our infographic and PDF creation services.
Technique No. 3 – Keep Images and Graphical Elements Fresh
Everybody knows that adding attractive images keeps people on websites for longer.
But eventually, even the best pictures grow stale. If somebody sees the same thing repeatedly, they’re going to stop paying attention to it.
For example, you may have a staff photo on a page about your team. However, several people in that photo have left the team in the years since you took it.
That’s an easy fix.
Take a new staff photo with the people you have now. You might even be able to create a blog post that introduces visitors to your new team. That’s two fresh pieces of content for the price of one!
That’s why it’s a good idea to run a sweep of your website every quarter to spot outdated images or irrelevant to the user!
Technique No. 4 – Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Since the beginning of 2021, approximately 55% of all internet traffic has come from mobile devices.
So, that begs the question:
Why haven’t you updated your website to make it as mobile-friendly as possible? The majority of your visitors use smartphones and tablet computers to access the site. To stay up-to-date, you have to think about how your website looks on these smaller screens.
Is the text readable?
Is it laid out in a way that makes it easy to understand and work through?
Can people see the images you share?
Can they navigate through your website?
All of these are critical questions to ask when optimizing a website for mobile devices. Thankfully, there are several tools available to help you see how mobile-friendly your website is, including Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Technique No. 5 – Revisit Your Keyword Data
You created your website with search engine optimisation in mind.
That means you likely have a list of keywords you created years ago that you’re targeting.
This isn’t a bad thing. However, it’s possible that your old keyword list doesn’t cover everything that your website offers anymore. For example, you may have introduced new products or services that you need to target towards different types of buyers. Or, your blog’s scope has expanded to the point where you’re covering more topics than you thought you would when you built your website.
Sometimes, people arrive at your website via keywords that you might never even think about.
With this in mind, you need to revisit your keyword data a couple of times each year to ensure you’re still targeting the right audience.
Start with your Google Search Console keyword data. Go through the lists of keywords that visitors use to find your website and you may just find a few that you’re not actively targeting. However, that data shows you that people use those keywords, meaning you now have a way to update your content to make it appeal to a broader audience.
If you do discover new keywords to target, run a sweep of your content. Think about where you could naturally incorporate those keywords so the content ranks highly for different searchers.
Modernise to Make Money
Up-to-date websites generate more revenue.
They attract more visitors and have content that is fresh enough to keep people coming back for more. Ultimately, they create more opportunities for you to sell to repeat visitors and the new people you attract with the updated content you provide.
So, take a close look at your website.
Ask yourself if the content is up to date. If it isn’t, what can you do to freshen it up or put a new spin on it? Do you have modern design elements? What about fresh images? Can the 55% of people who use mobile devices to browse websites access your site?
By asking these questions, you can create a list of potential updates you can make to keep your website fresh. And with the help of Automation Agency, you can make many of those updates to your images, blog posts, and content. To find out if we’re a good fit for you, take our Right Fit Quiz today.