“A stale website communicates a stale business” warns business coach Ryan James. If your web content is out-of-date you may be damaging your company’s reputation without even knowing it.
Ryan is spot on. If I come across a website that obviously hasn’t been updated for ages I either think that (a) they’re a company that doesn’t care about keeping customers in the loop or (b) they’ve abandoned the site for ever and gone out of business!
Either way, not a good image to leave potential customers with as I’m sure you’ll agree. In the current financial market, your marketing needs to be tighter than ever before. It’s time to sweep away the tumbleweed and update your web content.
Here are 3 good reasons to motivate you to do just that:
- Out-of-date content lowers your credibility: Trust and credibility are big issues on the web. Web visitors now expect fresh, up-to-date content and won’t tolerate old news. Provide them with fresh, informative content or they’ll click away.
- Regularly updated content improves your Google ranking: Search engines love fresh content. ‘Spiders’ like Googlebot harvest information about your pages for their search engine rankings. The more you update your content, the more often they’ll index you and you’ll rise up the Google rankings.
- Fresh, informative content pleases your customers: It’s a good way to improve the ‘stickiness’ of your site and entice visitors to delve deeper now and revisit at a later date. If you add new information about your products and services you’ll strengthen your proposition, boost your authority and generate more leads.
You may have glowing testimonials and case studies from recent clients that you’d would love to get up on your site, or you want to change your message in response to client feedback or even add an article that backs up your approach. If these tasks have slipped off the bottom of your ‘To Do’ list now’s the time to reinstate them.
Take control of your web content and bring your website back to life.
Or, as Richard Parslow of Goalscape puts it:
“Nothing is shabbier than an un-updated website with old news on it. It looks like an abandoned factory; sooner or later the kids will come and smash all the windows, then it will fill up with all sorts of wild birds, animals and plant life…”
Thanks for the colourful description Richard.
Check out his new and very visual life/programme management tool at http://www.goalscape.com.