Fall is here! The season of change. This should remind you that it’s time to update your website (if you aren’t doing so regularly or recently!) But how much is too much, or how little is too little?
There are two ways to approach this topic depending on your meaning, “How often should I overhaul my website?” or, “How often should I be updating content on my website?” There are two different answers to this question. Let’s take a look at the latter topic in-depth for Part I.
On one hand, the updating of content on your website is spurred by the changing of your business. For example, if you added a new service to your offerings, you would want to update the website right away to promote that new service. Or similarly, if you were no longer offering a product, you would be quick to update the website and remove that product line.
Outside of this, a lot of times, websites become stagnant. If your product and service offerings don’t change, then some businesses don’t touch their website for years at a time. Unfortunately, this is not helpful, and actually quite harmful for a few reasons.
Best guidelines suggest that updating your website copy every couple of weeks is the key to providing the appearance of an accurate and up-to-date web presence. We business owners are usually busy running things, so we always suggest our clients look over their website once a month at the very least. In 30-days it is very easy for information to fall out of date or become stagnant.
No, updating of copy refers to keeping things up-to-date and accurate. If your pricing and services have not changed, then you simply don’t need to update that page. We suggest paging through the website and making sure all the critical pages are accurate, and alternate between sets of critical and non-critical pages each month. There is no need to spend time clicking through every single page on your site, especially if you know nothing has changed, but it’s a good practice to check over them to ensure completeness and accuracy.
It’s best to think back to our younger years of writing essays in school. We all had that essay (or maybe a few) where we were required to hit a certain word or page mark and you couldn’t think of anything else to say. You’d already double-spaced everything, added justification, so how else would you reach 500 words? Well, you’d simply rewrite your information to be more verbose; say the same things, but in a different way, or provide more information explaining your position, even though the argument was already clear.
The same goes for updating your website. While you don’t need to delete everything and start from scratch every couple weeks, you can look over the content and almost always find tweaks, especially if you haven’t read the copy for a while. Many times, website owners don’t have time to write content, and the copy that gets provided to their website designer is something that was developed in a hurry in order to meet deadlines. If that copy has never been updated since, you are doing a disservice to yourself and your customers.
Some common items to check on review:
Hopefully this article has been helpful in determining when to update your website content, and also provided some ideas to answer the question of “what should I update?” when there aren’t any major things needing to change. Fresh copy is the key to a healthy website and search engine strategy.
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