When we set up our website we spend ages going through the messaging, making sure it is spot on for our audience and also fits the SEO bill (which has changed recently so make sure you’re up to scratch with the Panda and Penguin). The website content part of the creation is the most time consuming but once it’s up, we can sit back and revel in what a brilliant job was done, now we can move on.
What if I say that you should only move on for a little while and in fact within a month your website is out of date? Well, I’m afraid it’s true – if you haven’t added any new content to your website each and every month then it’s out of date. If you want to rank well in natural search (and you do or how else will people find your site), you need to be constantly adding fresh and relevant content to your site as frequently as possible and at least once a month.
In addition to that, you’ll probably find that within 12 months, that lovely content that you spent hours creating is not as relevant to your prospects/customers anymore. They’ve moved on, the industry has changed, the messaging that was perfect is now outdated.
I’ve recently had this eureka moment, after looking at how to better attract our target market I realised that we’d moved the goal posts slightly and the messaging on the site no longer appealed to the right people. It doesn’t feel hugely natural to break away from the trusted content that you put live with your lovely site but needs must, requirements have changed so the words we write have to aswell.
I would suggest that you sanity check the following on your website to make sure it’s doing a good enough job:
- Has your target market changed AT ALL in the past few months? If so then make sure your site content has to match it.
- Check out customer reviews or speak to your Account Managers – if they’re not talking in the same words as your website is, on the same topics then you need a content refresh.
- Look at what are the most popular searches on your website (can be done in Google Analytics), let these topics guide you on what you’re not writing about at all or is too hard to find.
- Ask your Mum to look at your site and tell you what you do – is it correct? Just because it makes sense to you, doesn’t mean it’s clear to everyone.
- Check out your competitors – what are they talking about and are they more current than you?
- Put a note in the calendar to do another sanity check in 6 months time…
