Websites that aren’t regularly updated can cause your business to lose out on driving new traffic and generating more leads. 

Even if your website is mobile-friendly, beautifully designed, and on-brand, if the content isn’t updated or added to, your site runs the risk of decreasing visibility.

Search engines like Google love fresh, new content. Every time a website is updated with new content, Google and other search engines crawl and index your web pages, and your site ranking is recalibrated. If your company keeps updating with high-quality content, meaning content your customers want, you increase your chances of exposure and visibility. Updated content helps raise your site’s domain authority. 

Read on to learn more about how content updates can help your brand get noticed. 

Stay Agile

The internet and digital marketing are shifting and ever-changing, so it takes time and energy to adapt and move with the trends of the online marketing space. One way to stay in front of the changing times is to maintain your site’s load time. A whopping 70% of consumers say webpage speed impacts their willingness to buy. If a site is too slow to load, they likely won't return in the future. Make sure your website is up to speed! Reach out if you'd like a website audit to see if your website could use a boost. 

Mobile-Friendly Isn’t an Option—It’s a Necessity

More than half of all web traffic is generated from mobile devices like iPhones, iPads, Android Phones, and Tablets. Now more than ever, if your website isn’t mobile-friendly and easy to view on a small screen, your brand could miss out on over half of your potential customers. As of 2019, there are almost 4 billion unique mobile internet users. The total number of active internet users is 4.4 billion. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile consumption, your brand isn’t sustainable and business will likely suffer. 

Maintain Credibility

Have you ever visited a website that looks outdated? Maybe its copyright date isn’t current, or its last blog post was published several years ago? If your content appears stagnant, you could be losing the attention of potential customers. When a visitor lands on your website, they want to know they’re connecting with a real, active business, not an archive of a former or lapsed business. If a customer feels like they’ve landed on a website that is no longer active, they’ll likely leave, which will drive up your site’s bounce rate. 

Refresh Keywords

Google and other search engines regularly update their search algorithms to maintain the best search results for users. Chances are, your competitors are already making changes and updates to their SEO strategy so that they can continually outrank you in a search query. The digital marketing world is fast-paced and it’s critical to keep up with the competition. Start by keeping the keywords on your website fresh. If you’ve added a new service or product or expanded to a new location, make sure to update your keywords so that you capture more traffic. If you don’t, you’ll continue to get traffic for only a fraction of what you offer. Additionally, prioritize adding keywords that you’re not currently targeting. It’s essential to think about alternative terms or phrases your ideal customer might use to search for your services or products, and how these trends may evolve over time. 

Upgrade Your Graphics

You have less than 15 seconds on average, to capture the attention of your site visitor. Your website’s visuals are a direct reflection of your business, and a website with outdated, off-brand or just static imagery can cost you customers. Do a routine check of your site to confirm that your photos and graphics are all in working order. Replace lo-res, fuzzy, or broken images. 

Invest in brand photos to professionalize and promote your services and products. Consider subscribing to a high-quality stock photo service like Adobe Stock to access a library of images, graphics, and illustrations. You can also have some success searching a photo site like Unsplash or Pik Wizard.

Prevent Broken Links

There’s a saying that a confused customer doesn’t act. It could also be said that an irritated customer doesn’t act, either. Broken links can negatively impact your site visitor’s experience, cause frustration, and prevent return visits. Broken links are bad links—they can cause you to lose clients and customers. If a customer tries to access information, visit your social account, or hop to another page on your site but the links are invalid, their trust in your brand can diminish. Broken links often hurt your conversion rates, too—after all, if the links to sign up, buy, contact, or enroll don’t work, how will your visitor become a customer? If you regularly post content with broken links, you may build a negative reputation as sharing invalid, low-quality content. Even more, broken links can negatively impact your authority with search engines. 

Start cleaning up your broken links with a link checking tool like Google Webmaster Tools or Broken Link Check. 

Dust off the cobwebs of your website by keeping up with blog content, ensuring links are valid, and that resources and references are relevant and active. The best brands prioritize providing a quality customer experience, and that includes—and often starts with—the online customer experience. An updated website can help you get more business, expand your reach, and convert visitors into leads or loyal customers. When you incorporate regular website updates into your marketing strategy, you’ll not only allow drive more relevant and promising traffic, but you’ll also capture attention and gain high-quality customers. 

Brush up on SEO best practices to ensure your site is up to speed. 

Need help keeping your website updated? 

Contact our website experts for help. We’ll assess your site and get it back in the game!