Your website is your digital home. Maintaining it and keeping it fresh, up to date and reflective of your brand image will help ensure your guests — current and potential customers — have the best possible experience and want to come back.
How can you drive traffic to your website? It’s a growing challenge for digital marketers trying to find a competitive edge in today’s marketplace where everything is online. A well-designed, easy-to-navigate, informative website is an important starting point. Maintaining it and keeping it fresh, up to date and reflective of your brand image is critical to ensure people find you and have a positive experience. It builds trust, loyalty and encourages repeat visits. Regular maintenance and updates will also ensure your website is helping you achieve your business objectives.
Your website is your online home. It’s the digital place potential customers visit to learn more about you and your products and services. If it’s an ecommerce site, it is where customers will purchase those products and services. If you aren’t attentive and don’t take care of it, your target audience will go elsewhere. If their experience on your site is underwhelming or less than seamless, they will have a negative perception of your brand, which hurts your reputation.
Why you should consistently update and maintain your website
There are five important reasons every marketer should focus on optimizing their brand’s online home and introduction to potential customers.
1. Enhanced SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical digital marketing strategy designed to help businesses get discovered on search engines. A great user experience is key for Google’s algorithm and the core of an effective SEO strategy. Maintaining and regularly updating your website to ensure it is user-centric, accessible and easy to navigate — and has fast load times, visual stability and pages optimized for mobile — will help you earn high rankings on search engine results pages. This improves your site’s visibility and makes it easier for people to find you. These metrics are part of Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative, which helps “quantify the experience of your site and identify opportunities to improve.” Google is also focused on user intent. To that end, it prioritizes high-quality, relevant content that searchers will find useful and engaging. Routinely refreshing and adding new, relevant content to your site tells Google that your website is active and trustworthy, and should be indexed more frequently — another way to improve your search engine ranking.
Tip: Use Google’s Page Insights Tool to ensure your website is ready for mobile.
2. Increased user engagement
A vibrant, well-maintained website that’s easy to use, works well and always has new, relevant content tells your audience that you value their interest and are committed to providing the best user experience possible. Ongoing improvement and fresh content also build credibility and community, which further encourage people to keep coming back.
Best practices:
- Establish a schedule of regular maintenance. This will allow you to troubleshoot issues before they become problems and ensure all functions work to provide a seamless user experience.
- Use a scheduling calendar to ensure you are regularly refreshing content, such as product pages, blog posts, videos and Q&As, to provide users with the latest information they can use.
3. Improved website security
The average cost of a data breach globally is US$4.88 million. The financial implications of cyberattacks can include compensating customers for damages, addressing the vulnerability and, potentially, legal expenses. More than this, data breaches result in lost trust, both on the part of existing customers who may be directly impacted and potential customers who learn about the hack. In an instant, the brand reputation and recognition you’ve worked long and hard to create can be wiped out. Regularly updating your website will help you stay current with software security updates and security patches, reducing the risk of breaches and protecting your customers and your business.
Cybersecurity best practices:
- Select platforms and third-party apps and plug-ins that prioritize security.
- Manage administrative rights and access to sensitive data.
- Enable Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) encryption.
- Require customers and staff to use strong passwords.
- Provide cyber training to employees and suppliers.
- Watch for unusual activity.
4. Boosting internal links
A key aspect of a strong SEO strategy is to make it easy for Google — where more than 90 per cent of all global searches happen — and other search engines to understand and index your content. This will drive traffic to the web pages you want to showcase and, ultimately, help you increase sales. By regularly posting new content you create the opportunity to strategically link to other related content on different pages on your site, which helps search engines navigate your overall site, improving SEO and encouraging users to spend more time with you.
5. Brand consistency
Consistency is a defining characteristic of a successful multichannel marketing strategy. Regularly maintaining and updating your website provides an opportunity to make sure your brand image, your voice and the messaging and offers your target audience sees are consistent across your digital channels. Building a great website is essential in today’s online marketplace. But it’s just the beginning. Regularly maintaining and updating your digital home is just as important to delivering a positive user experience, which attracts new customers and keeps existing customers coming back.
