Updating Your Business Website

Updating your website content is essential to remain relevant and keep your loyal supporters informed. Imagine you’re a healthcare company and you’ve just won an award for best local business in the field. That’s an accolade that may sway someone to choose you over the competitor. If your website isn’t updated with the award, they’ll never know and may stick with the competitor.

That’s just one example of how letting your website fall out of date can cost you business. In this article, I’ll provide a comprehensive overview of why it’s so important to keep your website updated. Continue reading to learn why updating your website is important and how to update website content.

Why Is It Important To Keep Your Website Content Updated

Your website is essentially a digital headquarters for your business and branding. It’s the place where consumers, employees and other industry professionals can stay in touch with your business. It’s also the hub for winning over new supporters that stumble upon your Google listing and haven’t previously heard of your company.

It would be extremely detrimental to your business to lose a potential sale because you’ve failed to keep your website relevant. In the sections below, I’ll break down a few key reasons why it’s essential to keep your website updated.

group of employees sitting at long wooden rectangle table in conference room with see-through doors

Increase Brand Exposure

Trends come and go. You never know what’s going to happen. Maybe your law firm specializes in wrongful termination suits and the local automotive manufacturing facility just got busted firing employees unethically. That wouldn’t be the time to find out that you forgot to update your site with information about your specialization.

It’s important to keep your content updated so you’re more likely to gain exposure from trends and keep the general audience engaged – improving your brand image in doing so. Creating content on relevant, timely topics keeps your brand fresh in the feed – whether it’s Google, Bing, or social media.

The more relevant information you provide, the more likely your brand is to pop up in front of new eyes. On the flip side, if you don’t regularly update your content you may be quickly forgotten.

Give Loyal Supporters Fresh Content

As an established organization or a newer organization that has a small but dedicated following, it’s important to strengthen brand loyalty. Continuing to foster your relationship with existing supporters can only benefit your organization.

If you sell a pharmaceutical product that went through a recent series of successful clinical trials, posting a blog or webpage not only keeps supporters updated but highlights your product’s effectiveness. Take it to the next level and combine video with photography, using the assets from your library to support your blog content.

By keeping your content fresh, you ensure that existing customers and supporters are always provided with new information and a unique experience every time they visit the site. You’re also framing your brand identity in an active, positive manner. If you don’t update your site, you risk earning the stamp of a stale, stagnant brand with a lackluster digital presence. Digital dinosaurs won’t keep the interest of consumers for long.

Keep Readers Informed

Another way to gain a strong reputation as an authoritative brand is to keep readers informed on the latest news and trends in your industry. That means consistently posting content that’s relevant to your target demographic.

If you own a manufacturing facility and new safety regulations are put in place, you could write an article that explains the new regulations and highlights how your plant plans to enforce them.

Try to keep your content library diverse with a mix of evergreen topics and current events within your industry. This allows you to provide quality insight and showcase your expertise within the field.

Ensure Visuals Are Accurate

Outdated visuals are treacherous. Have you ever clicked on a website and found yourself staring at outdated fashion trends? If you have stock photos or outdated pictures, the quality of your website plummets.

It’s important to update the visuals on your site regularly to ensure they’re as accurate as possible. Everything from commercial lifestyle shots that you use as visual support throughout your website to team portraits and individual headshots, images must represent your business as it exists at the moment.

It also helps to keep your team pages updated regularly to make sure you’re putting forth the best version of your company. If seven of your employees have since moved to new companies but remain on your team page, you’re not providing an accurate representation of your staff.

group of construction workers standing in front of piles of stone and CAT vehicles with crossed arms

Improve SEO

Along with trends and consumer attention spans, Google and other search engines are constantly changing. By regularly updating their algorithms, search engines aim to provide the best, most relevant information to users.

For small businesses, it can be hard to keep up with every algorithm update. If you make sure that all web pages are updated and consistently add new, relevant content, your site will be equipped with SEO value. SEO value can give your site more visibility and you can reach new eyes in the search engine results.

Strengthen Security

New content isn’t the only component to a website update. It also means checking your security features to make sure they’re recent and effective. Technology evolves rapidly, and as technology evolves so do hackers and security threats.

By updating your website, you make sure that you have up-to-date security measures to avoid breaches and digital disasters.

How To Update Website Content

By now, you should understand why it’s so important to update your website content and be eager to take action on your site. In the sections below, I’ll discuss a few steps that you can take to make sure that your site is up-to-date and relevant.

Audit Existing Pages

To kickstart your update, go through all of your existing pages and audit the content. While you should read through each page and make sure all of the content is relevant, there are several other items that you’ll want to look for.

Here are a few items to check when auditing your existing pages:

Any new updates on design themes or plug-ins
Images not loading or loading slowly (improper image files)
Outdated or incorrect information
Broken links or URLs
Sylistic or formatting issues
Completely irrelevant content

Research Competitor Content

After you’ve updated existing content, it’s time to brainstorm new content. Sometimes the best place to start is your direct competitors. You can look for new content ideas that they’ve posted recently.

When researching competitors, compare the gaps in your content where they have relevant and engaging topics that are missing on your site. You can also find additional valuable information to enhance your existing content or build off of an existing piece to create a new piece.

automotive repairman wiping hands standing in shop

Establish A Content Calendar

Whether you have a marketing team to produce content or you’re on your own, it’s helpful to establish a content calendar. Typically, creating a content calendar includes identifying topics to create new content around that can also be used for social media and other marketing initiatives.

It doesn’t matter the cadence in which you post your content. Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or anything else, it’s just important that you regularly post new content to your site.

Create A Process For Adding New Team Members

If you don’t already have one, create a step in your onboarding process for new employees to be added to the staff directory and team page on your website. If you don’t have a team page, your first step is creating one.

By incorporating this into your onboarding process, you make sure that your staff is as up-to-date as possible on your site.

Update Headshots and Images Annually

New employees and tenured staff alike, you should regularly update all of your website’s imagery on a regular basis – annually is a good cadence. This should include updating team headshots, portraits, product advertisements and general visual marketing content on your site.

If you’re on a tight budget you can get away with using your iPhone camera if you read up on a few tips and tricks to get quality images. If you can muster up the funds, it’s a smart investment to find a professional photographer that can provide you with a diverse library of high-quality. images. Hiring a professional ensures that you have an efficient company photoshoot and that all of your photos are on-brand.

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Update Your Website Imagery With Casey Templeton Photography

I hope that you found all of this information useful and know what you need to do to keep your website updated. As long as you make a point to regularly audit existing content, refresh imagery, search for new topics and stick to your content calendar, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Casey Templeton Photography can help you acquire high-quality, professional images to use for your website to ease the process. Casey specializes in business branding and has experience behind the lens shooting for companies of all sizes and industries. To learn more about updating your website or to get started on a project, fill out our contact form.