Update your website regularly to keep it fresh.

Recently published statistics suggest that over 70% of websites remain untouched for months at a time. To be fair, we are not sure how this statistic could be easily established, short of continuously visiting all the websites regularly over a long period of time. However, we do believe there is some truth in it. Many of our new clients come to us for help with a new SEO campaign and we quickly learn their websites have remained unchanged since they were originally built. Most companies, other than updating prices, changing staff bios, or adding new products, will do very little to their websites.

Updating your website on a regular basis keeps it interesting to your visitors and to the search bots. That’s why, if you do a search on Google and keep going down the results past page ten of the results, you are most likely to find old websites that are either no longer popular, used or that are defunct.

Search spiders are looking for activity. The more activity you create, the better your chances of moving up in the rankings. It really is as simple as that.

Updating your website content, adding a blog or news sections, and changing the images on a regular basis are all ways to ensure there is something different for visitors to look at. In these days of such fierce online competition, we cannot rely upon customers remembering who we are and checking in to see what’s available. Only the really big, global brands and well-known companies have the luxury of this type of behaviour and customer loyalty. For smaller businesses, it is essential to create reasons to come and take a look, browse around and engage.

In addition, updating your website regularly gives you the opportunity to adjust and amend your keyword choice. This is important as over time, terms change and trends can make once popular keywords choices, much less popular. For example, not long ago, Platform shoes were one of the least popular fashion items. Now they are huge once more.

We’ve mentioned images already, but it is worth saying that changing images lets you keep your brand image fresh. In addition, the subject of a photograph and the quality of it can quickly look out of date and jaded. Keeping the photography, video and other multimedia material on your website fresh keeps everything looking up to date.

Your website is like a shop window in this respect. And if you have a shop window, would you leave it unchanged, unpolished and ignored for months at a time? We doubt it. A shop window has to be creative, interesting, enticing, and attractive. It should say, this is who we are and this is what we can do for you. But most importantly it should say, this business is busy and incredibly popular, it is also modern and well run.

Now think about your website. Does your website say all these things to each visitor that comes across it?