Website Content Maintenance: Fresh, Frequent & Fashionable
Fresh, relevant website content increases targeted traffic naturally. Who wants a stale, 3-day old bagel for breakfast when there are fresh ones coming out of the bakery just this morning? Your local café is serving them up with a variety of your favorite toppings – daily, and that’s why you go there. Stop to consider the stale content that has been sitting on your website since it was launched. Are you one of those business owners who launched a nice new site, complete with your first 2 or 3 blog posts, then moved on? If your most recent blog post or content update is dated, say February, 2014, your site is stale and probably getting very little attention from your target audience. Your site basically died last year if that’s the case. What has your company been doing for all this time? What about your social pages? What exactly is your online presence saying about the relevancy of your company within its industry – today? Consumers as well as business people have insatiable appetites for new information that can help or entertain them. Hunger for knowledge needs to be satisfied frequently. Stale websites, like stale bagels, just don’t attract customers hungry for a fresh serving of something good. When returning visitors come to your website, looking for what’s new and find exactly the same content as their last visit, you’ve just given them permission, if not encouragement, to visit your competition’s websites. They’ll visit your competitors to find out what’s new in your market! Make your website the authoritative source! To be a leader in your market, or the thought leader in your industry, your website needs to reflect your genuine professionalism. Our slogan applies here: “Keep your website as professional as you are!” A big part of website professionalism is publishing industry-leading information – regularly and often enough. Google and other search engines rank your website based on how often you update your content as well as the quality of content in your updates & posts. Matt Richardson, writing for Formstack, explains how search engines like Google work. “Search engines send “spiders” or “bots” around the web to “crawl” sites’ contents and follow their links, noting any changes along the way. These spiders come around on a schedule. If your site gets crawled, say, once a week and they notice a consistent change ever time, they’ll return more often. Hot, frequently updated sites like big news sites will get crawled multiple times per hour. If they don’t see changes after repeat visits, your site appears inactive and they’ll come around less often.” Here’s a real kicker: “If you aspire to show up in searches for the latest trends, but haven’t been updating or blogging consistently, your rankings may lag behind by up to several weeks. This is one reason why blogs are so important for SEO. Blogs let you post a regular stream of content relevant to your topic and search terms.” Because blogs are the most common way organizations keep their audiences informed on a frequent basis, Google has been steadily adding weight to blog content. They’ve designed their sophisticated algorithms to find web searchers’ information based on the contextual, situational and relational quality of the content. In simple terms, Google wants to serve up fresh and valuable content to its searchers. Out of date content is irrelevant, and because it’s easily detected, Google will screen it from top search results. It’s easy to understand why quality of content is important. Now you know why frequency of updates is just as crucial to a visible and high performing website. Blog and news pages are your social share points! When people find links to your website content in social shares and then click them, it tells Google and the other search engines that your site is attracting attention and this validates referral traffic. Social referrals are a strong indication of being an authoritative resource – people are willing to refer friends and business associates to your blog article or website because it proved to be valuable for them. The search engines index social media content on popular social platforms, like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Google, in particular, has made it very clear that they’re giving more weight to social media signals, both from your company’s own social media pages and other accounts which are interacting with your brand and linking to your site. Social media are great places to engage and introduce your brand to new people, but from there you need a way to “leave the party together.” Your website is the best place online for a more “intimate” relationship. Posting valuable information to your blog gives you a place to which you can readily invite visitors – a place where you control the message and conversation. Your blog is a great platform to share videos as well as written articles. A blog is also a great enabler for the content marketer. It provides you and ideal mechanism to publish content worth sharing socially. You can keep it fresh, relevant and entertaining to your specific audience. Frequency is your friend. Now the question becomes, how often should you post new content? Matt Richardson offers broad and general guidance. “It’s hard to prescribe an exact formula and depends in which medium you’re posting – on your site, on your blog, or on your social media profiles. For blogs and website updates, generally once a month or more can be adequate for a small business, unless you’re expected to always keep up with the bleeding edge news…” In reality, many small businesses have increased blogging frequency to weekly or semi-weekly with positive results and no complaints from followers. Your SEO Consultant or Website Maintenance Provider should be able to provide further guidance based on your unique situation. Consult with them or Parker Web Services to get recommendations on frequency of website/blog updates as well as what kinds of content to post. For most businesses, Social
Website Serviceability is a Key to Growth
Can your website change at the speed of business? Making sure your website is easy to update is like greasing the skids at a boatyard: without sufficient lubricant, the boat you want to slide easily into the water will get hung up, and just sit there on dry land waiting for some superior force to push it down the skids. A website that is not easily serviceable is in a similar state. It sits there useless until someone can finally figure out how to update it to reflect the current state of business. The need to continually update an active business website is a no-brainer. Every business owner knows, and every web developer will tell you, that keeping a site current is of utmost importance. By now it is well known that the more often a site is updated with new, quality content, the higher it will be ranked by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. Despite this knowledge, however, a great many business websites stay virtually the same as the day they were launched for far too long; and those that do change are often updated long after their business has undergone significant changes. These sites never catch up to reality. Why? Oftentimes it’s because they are not easy to service. If this describes your current website, there are a number of things you can do to make sure your site has a high serviceability rating. Choose web development tools that are easy to understand and update. Website Serviceability depends on how your site was developed in the first place. You should consider the long-term maintenance implications of the software or systems used to build or redesign your site prior to building or redesigning it. There are risks in using less well known and harder to manage development tools, and you should be aware of them. If your site is relatively complex and was custom developed using raw HTML, XML or other development languages, chances are its content can only be managed and updated by the developers themselves or by IT pros who are familiar with the programming languages used. But what if the developer goes out of business or moves out of state? And what if your business can’t afford the luxury of a web dedicated IT professional in house? A better choice is to choose a CMS (Content Management System) development tool anyone can use and anyone can maintain – especially if serviceability is your goal. For example, WordPress is a program originally designed for blog creation and maintenance. In recent years, it has become the industry’s leading CMS and site building tool due to its robust content management capabilities, ease of use, depth, and flexibility. It requires that you already have a domain name and hosting service, but after that, designing and setting up a site is relatively easy. A WordPress-developed site can be easily updated in-house by virtually anyone, and it can be seamlessly tied to your CRM system for added user-oriented functionality. If WordPress is not your CMS, what CMS is your developer using? Is it well known, easy to use? Does it support other popular business management programs? Use one or more of the following links to see how your CMS stacks up in comparison to others: http://trends.builtwith.com/ http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all A dedicated maintenance team is critical to your site’s serviceability—and your success. Website development is very project-focused. Website maintenance, on the other hand, is very task-focused. These are two different types of work flow and work management styles. Development is extremely creative, much like the vision that goes into new car design. This creative vision is the heart and value of what website development firms deliver. Maintenance is much more technical and mechanical, with a much smaller, narrower focus. It requires a repetitiveness that is not usually a strong suit of creative firms. A company dedicated to maintenance—much like an auto repair shop—is focused on repetitive tasks day in and day out. Your site’s serviceability will be well served by a team whose primary focus is maintenance. Enhancing user experience is your top priority. The prime function of your website is not to serve you; it is to serve your customers (who in turn serve your business with its lifeblood – revenue). When people enjoy using your site, and derive value from it, its value to your company increases many fold. Conversely, when the information or functionality of your site is out of date, inaccurate or otherwise behind the times, users will be frustrated and, in all likelihood, will not return. It’s your responsibility to keep your site current in real time, so that it provides users a rewarding experience. This can only be accomplished if your site is easily serviceable. Helping you do that is our top priority. Parker Web Services specializes in fast, knowledgeable and affordable website maintenance services. It is vital to keep your website up to date and looking as professional as you are. With regular and ongoing website maintenance, your site functions as a source of client attraction, lead generation, increased revenue, and streamlined daily operations. Being able to service it should be the last thing you have to worry about. Our proactive approach stops website crashes, out-of-date applications, malware attacks, and anything else that slows down your business success on the internet. Do you need help with optimizing your website serviceability? We’re here to help. Call 1-877-321-2251 or contact us online. Parker Web prides itself on providing a top-notch website experience. Schedule a call today.
Website Maintenance – Defining the New Services Industry Segment
High performance websites need a maintenance service plan. Websites are the central hub of communications for most companies. A proprietary website is the only place on the Internet over which you have total control of your message. Only you determine the purpose, function and content of your custom built website. The phrase “online marketing” fades away as being online is part of everyone’s daily life, work and entertainment reality. As such, the idea of “digital marketing” no longer works because websites are where brands live and breathe today. Virtually all communications technologies have gone digital. Keep in mind that your website can serve your business in many ways beyond displaying information and generating leads. Some businesses perform multiple operations through their websites which engage customers, strategic partners and employees. Others use websites as their primary customer transaction centers as in e-commerce. We call this “Operational Integration.” As you realize all of the ways to integrate the Internet into your business operations, major advances become achievable. With something as important to your business as the design and functionality of your Web infrastructure, you would think by this day and age a website maintenance service industry would be well defined and burgeoning. Amazingly, there is no clearly recognized website maintenance services category in the market. We know of no trade associations specifically dedicated to developing and supporting this (new) industry segment. Your website maintenance choices are generally limited to your website designer, agency or in house staff. If it’s in house, you probably use a CMS which may limit your ability to make certain changes you want. Of course, you or your staff must dedicate time to website maintenance. If you use your designer or agency, you may wince knowing that more invoices are coming once you pick up the phone or send a change request. Years ago we heard the clamoring for a better way to keep a substantial investment – your website – performing efficiently and delivering a solid return. We recognized this need and developed a business plan to provide the service. Having succeeded in building the service model, we now believe it’s important to develop standards and best practices for our new services industry category – website maintenance services. It will help to point out that we are not in the website design business, but practically every other web services company is. If a client spends $10,000 – $20,000 perhaps $50-grand or more on their company’s web design & development, it should start paying for itself quickly without another thick layer of expense just to keep it relevant and performing effectively. Convenient, affordable maintenance service plans should be plentiful in the market, but they are very hard to find. Obviously, it’s nice to be a diamond in the rough at this point, but we know there are market forces driving our niche business model toward a growing services segment. We’d like to help serve the marketplace by sharing best practices we’ve learned through patience, practice and continuous improvement of website maintenance services. We’ll begin by defining the website maintenance space using a simple analogy. Ford Motor Company designs new cars. Other people maintain them – for a good reason! It will help to clearly delineate Website Maintenance Service as separate and apart from Website Design & Development, so let’s expound on our analogy: Let’s say you’ve identified your new vehicle choice by looking through auto manufacturer brochures, comparing the designs, features and options you want. You place an order which goes to the manufacturer (Ford Motor Company) and your customized vehicle arrives at your local Ford dealer. The moment you drive off the lot, you have options for maintaining your new Ford. You can use your Ford dealership service department. You can also use any other dealership service department. They all have access to replacement parts and the tools to work on your car. Of course, most new car dealerships charge top rates for service to help cover their large overhead. Maybe your ideal auto maintenance choice is your experienced local mechanic shop. They too have access to all the tools, parts and technology to keep your Ford running sweet. They keep rates reasonable because all they do is work on cars and their overhead is much lower than a dealer’s. You appreciate knowing they’re an ASE Certified auto mechanic, being trained in current technologies and automotive best practices. Liken a website maintenance service company to your highly skilled and experienced local mechanics. They can be your best option for almost all of your service needs. You really can’t hire Ford Motor Company to service your new Ford. You can get pretty close by using your authorized Ford dealer, but Ford and other manufacturers are smart enough to know it’s better to have maintenance services handled locally and independently. Ford is in the business of designing and building vehicles, not operating thousands of service centers around the world! Your marketing agency or website design firm is in the business of designing and building websites. Providing affordable maintenance services drains resources from what they’re really good at – creating and building – so many of them treat web maintenance like a “forgotten stepchild.” Agencies and designers who offload maintenance to a trusted third party can keep their focus on better strategic marketing and design services for their clients. In fact, some of our best referral partners are marketing agencies and website design firms. The synergy of our relationships serves our mutual clients very well. Establishing and Codifying the Website Maintenance Services Industry Parker Web Service defines Website Maintenance as: Technical and content development services designed to monitor and maintain existing websites to keep them functioning and performing at optimal efficiency; services that perform updates and changes in five major areas: technical, operational, marketing, user-experience and Internet standards. We have coined the acronym – TOMUS – as an easy way to remember the 5 Website Maintenance service categories: Technical Operational Marketing User-experience Standards Setting Website Maintenance Standards Parker