Every single website out there from the biggest to the smallest, including yours should be a work in progress. Once the initial planning, design, development and testing of a website is finished and it’s ready to go, you can launch it, the site will be live but there is still a lot of work to do from that point onwards. Having the website is just the first step, so before you tick it off the ‘to do list’ and move and to the next item, make sure you have taken into account the fact that there will be more work to do in terms of creating content and keeping things up to date to keep both your website visitors and Google happy.

Websites should be fluid and ever changing for a number of reasons in fact. You can login and change images, update offers, add blog posts and latest news, change up your copy and messaging as well as add or take away pages. What you can do is what you actually should be doing. Your website designer should enable you to make edits to your site and help and encourage you to do those things often. Part of my service is delivering a website to my clients with tutorials on how to make those changes and I am always happy to teach my clients about further changes they can make to their site beyond the basics too. I believe business owners should have the freedom to make changes to their site as often as they post on their social media account and that there should be no fear or overwhelm surrounding making these changes.

As well as this though, the way websites are now is the result of years of changes, updates and evolution. Websites are designed to help you keep adding to them and moving them along, not to stand still. The technology of websites, trends and browsing behavior never stop changing so it’s really important that websites keep up with this so that they are working to the best of their ability and ultimately so your site can be found and you can get clients.

So factoring in these thoughts, let’s look at why your website should always be a work in progress.

Your business will evolve

Your business probably won’t be exactly the same as it was when you started. I know from experience that the businesses I have run have not stood still for long and your website should reflect this. If your website no longer reflects what you do as a business then you’ve allowed it to go out of date and this won’t reflect well on your business and could be losing you clients. 

A lot of business owners spend too much time and focus too much of their energy on social media whilst neglecting their websites and not updating them for months or years at a time. If a potential client clicks through to your site from a shiny social media profile and your site is clearly out of date or not in alignment with what you’re doing on your socials, this can confuse them and potentially put them off.

If you have images or a portfolio on your site, this is one thing you can constantly update to keep things current so try to set yourself a weekly or monthly task of doing this. Your website is the perfect place to showcase what you do as well as socials.

You might have posted an offer on your site or something timely which needs to be updated. If your site appears to be out of date in any way to your visitors, it can be really off putting and potentially lose you clients, so this is one thing to ensure you keep up to date.

As your business evolves, you might also find new uses for your site. It can be a great place to send people to complete forms, book a meeting with you or host an online portal for your clients to view information. The great thing is your website can grow with your business and fulfill any number of jobs you need it to do, not just attracting clients.

Meeting SEO demands

One of the biggest reasons to keep things current on your website is to please Google. A completed website is just the first step mainly for this reason. And even the most amazing, stunning website is almost completely pointless if no one can find it.

Google wants to see content being constantly updated and it will favour sites that have had changes made frequently and more recently meaning your site will show up higher in its rankings.

It’s also very important to have website copy that’s SEO optimised to help your site climb up in Goggle rankings, it’s also really important to be frequently adding images that have relevant keyword alt tags.

But even more than that, Google now loves sites that use video. Plus the chances of achieving a page one Google listing increase by up to 53% when there is a video involved and using video on key landing pages can boost your conversion rates by up to 80%. Video is still a hugely under utilised tool that I encourage by clients to get on boards with to improve their website SEO.

To please Google as well as featuring video content on your site, make sure you come up with a content strategy that ensures you are adding plenty of relevant and interesting content in the form of blog posts, articles and latest news or offers. Longer articles tend to prove more popular and search engines will also look at how long visitors are spending on specific pages of your site as well as on your site overall to measure the relevance and interest of the content.

For more tips on how to please Google I’d recommend taking a look at what Google themselves recommend here.

Meeting visitor demands

 As well as Google being a demanding beast, so will your website users be. Website users are increasingly demanding as well as having increasingly short attention spans with so much noise out there that your site needs to contend with. This is another reason to make sure your content is engaging, relevant, interesting and that it speaks directly to your ideal clients.

The user experience of your site is also very important. Visitors won’t have the patience to wait for a slow site to load, a button to work or a link to work, so it’s important to make sure everything on your site is working in a user-friendly way. This is the job of your website designer, but as your site evolves, if you feel like the functionality of something no longer serves your site, it’s important to make the changes to it straight away.

So, if you have let your site get a bit rusty and forgotten about, it’s time to dust it off, get it up to date and create a strategy as to what content you are going to get posting on it. I blog weekly as well as constantly making small updates to my site, but I know that’s related to what i do and it’s my job. Even if you set this as a task to complete once a month, it’s important to set aside some time. You don’t need to be blogging weekly or even monthly, but it’s important to keep it frequent as well as achievable for you.

If you need help coming up with content ideas for your business, you’ll get a ton of ideas from this blog post to get your started. And if you’re ready to work on your branding and website project or you’d like to learn more about how I work with clients to help their businesses stand out online, get in touch and let’s chat!