Fresh websites yield fresh sales inquiries

Once upon a time, in a decade not far from this, you could set up your website and forget it – without serious consequences.

As long as you paid your annual hosting fees, you could sit back, relax and wait for the queries to roll in.

In those days online competition was scarce and your website was pretty much always at the top of relevant search engine results pages.

How times have changed!

Nowadays every competitor and his dog (almost literally!) has a relatively recent website, all clamouring for the attention of search engines and in turn your customer’s online quest for a good supplier.

And these days if you don’t bother refreshing your site with new content on a regular basis, it may well go the way of dot-com dollars and disappear off the face of the earth, or at least Google, forever.

So what’s changed? Why is it that what was once a low maintenance no brainer now a constant source of e-angst.

The two biggest reasons are Google’s “algorithm”, and customer expectations.

According to Google’s official webmaster blog, if your content is not frequently updated or if your site is not relevant to the subject, most likely you will not be crawled (by their indexing bots) as often as you would like to be.

In other words, Google rewards fresh content relevant to your keywords by crawling your site more often, and if it likes what it sees, giving it a leg-up in where it sits in search results.

But bots aren’t the only ones to reward your website freshening efforts. Real people actually respond to it too.

How often have you returned to a website after some time and felt somewhat disappointed that it was exactly the same as when you visited a few years before?

Again (as pointed out here a few weeks back) it’s no different to a magazine cover or shop window. For the respective proprietors not to change these would be commercial suicide. Yet website operators literally do set and forget their websites for years.

The result is that customers new and old get the impression that if your business is like your website, it will be lazy, stale and out of date.

So how do you ensure that your site is kept fresh and up to date?

Here’s my top seven tips.

1. Ensure you have a good content management system
If you’ve read this blog before, this message should well be sinking in by now. CMSs are the key to both saving money and making money.

Instead of losing business by delaying a change to your website, you and your staff can go into the website and make changes yourselves at any time and usually from any place – capitalising on every new content idea you have and saving a packet in the process.

2. If you can, start selling online
By selling your products and services online, not only are you creating the passive income streams we all strive for, but you are providing pages of luscious new content that search engines look for and reward accordingly.

For example, say you had 10 products within a certain category. Instead of just a single page describing those products you now have 10 separate pages with the product, category and brand names that will have Google et al buzzing around in no time. In other words, 10 times the chances to be crawled and indexed.

3. Start an e-newsletter and repurpose the content
This blog has been outspoken about the benefits of regular e-newsletters. But rather than just give newsletter content a single life, which is quickly confined to the recycle bin, adding individual news items to your website again provides more opportunities to provide fresh and interesting content for web passers by.

4. Get ‘add to homepage’ automation
Good CMSs include “add to homepage” article automation. So if you are providing a new piece about a new product or service, you simply tick a box for that piece to be added to a “What’s New” or “Latest News” section on the front page of your site.

5. Schedule regular overhauls of your front page
Ensure front page overhauls are scheduled as often as possible. Some of your business might be seasonal, which provides cues as to when you should do this. If your website is designed correctly, it will allow you or your staff to do this without compromising the overall site design. As outlined in the blog entry mentioned above, permanent sections surrounding What’s New, What’s Hot (or popular) and What’s Cheap (or on sale) force you into this way of thinking.

6. Schedule regular products/services of the month
A product or service of the month is a great way to freshen your site and keep visitors and search engines returning.

7. Offer tips and advice about the use of your product/service
If yours is a product or service that doesn’t change or develop regularly, you can offer related user tips and hints about getting the most out of that product. For example if you manufactured fish tanks you could include a page on plants or shells that may suit different fish and so on.

If you can introduce these tips you’ll find inquiries from both search engines and your website multiplying rapidly.

Craig Reardon is a leading eBusiness educator and founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which provide the gamut of ‘pre-built’ website solutions, technologies and services to SMEs in Melbourne and beyond. www.theeteam.com.au