Back in the day it was easy to maintain a website – you set it out like a sales brochure, had a bit about your company, told people about your products and then hoped that people contacted you. Nowadays content is such a highly used asset on your website and in fact a driver to get people to visit, how often should you be updating it?
There are of course variations such as what type of site do you have? E-commerce sites should be updated regularly with new products, stock availability and offers. Travel sites will naturally update whenever a new package comes up and tickets become available. What about the rest of the site though, your about us or contact details or homepage?
A website only gets leads as long as it remains fresh to the visitor, so find out how many repeat visits you get, if you don’t get any then great it’ll be fresh each time. If people are visiting more than twice then you need to be making some changes.
I recently moved a ‘pricelist request’ button on my company website, our call to actions had been sat down the side for months and people probably glazed over them as part of the furniture. We saw over double the enquiries in the week after we moved it – and that was just a button.
Here are some suggestions for updating your content by type:
Homepage – every 3 to 6 months for generic and something that changes every month such as an offer/banner/blog.
About us/contact – 6 months is ok but make sure its up-to-date with any company messaging changes and contact details. A Twitter feed is a nice way to keep it fresh with no input from you.
Blogs/FAQs/Guides – At minimum once a month but ideally as much as you can manage to once a week. This content is a driver of traffic to your site and is what can be used across your other marketing channels. Once a year go through this content and make sure there is no out of date information on there.
Product/Service – Dependant on your business and how frequently your offerings change, make sure they are as up-to-date as what your sales person is selling, there is nothing worse than a site lagging behind on what is available to the customer.
It’s not just words
Don’t forget that your website content does not just include words, once a year is a good time to review your design, buttons, navigation and just sanity check that it’s doing the job. If you’re targeted on increasing website conversions or sales then you’ll need to make sure that your website is working harder for you each year.
