Article courtesy Gordon Advisors, P.C.
Revising your small business website is like breathing new life into it. Fresh content, new images or infographics and updated security features all interact with visitors while giving the search-bots new reasons to crawl your site again. Whether you are new to the SEO game or you’re practically a professional, it should come at no surprise that this is vital to your website’s rankings. Higher rankings equals more visitors, more conversions and higher revenues. Let’s look into the specifics of why regular updates are absolutely crucial for a small business website.
Load Time
A fast load time is vital to the success of any website. Today’s instant gratification society isn’t willing to wait on a page to load slowly. When people click on your page, they want it to pop up almost immediately but, certainly within five seconds. This is so important that Google’s algorithms actually reward sites for pages with a fast load time and the reward is better rankings. You know what happens from there.
Fresh Content
Updating your small business website frequently gives you the opportunity to add new and fresh content. Fresh content attracts more visitors if it is informative, high quality content. As time passes, it becomes painfully obvious when content on a site is old and outdated. Additionally, every time fresh content is added to a site, the search-bots crawl it to index that page. This doesn’t necessarily mean higher indexing every time. However, if the added content is superior, then the opportunity is there, and superior content is rewarded with higher rankings. Security Security is absolutely vital to every website, e-commerce or not. People want to know that the site they are visiting is secure. If it is, they will typically stay longer and visit more often leading to conversions. Technology is advancing so rapidly that frequent updates are necessary to keep sites secure. Successful small businesses are especially vulnerable because they make great targets for hackers. When hackers see that the site performs regular security updates, they go elsewhere.
Keywords
Every time you add new and fresh content to your website it is an opportunity to utilize more keywords naturally within the pages. Naturally flowing keywords are important ranking signals to the search-bots. Some algorithms target keywords specifically and it is obvious when they are forced. Fresh content equals more opportunity for naturally flowing keywords and higher rankings.
Functionality
Technological advances create new and evolving trends almost daily. Not too long ago, a responsive site was reserved for only the most advanced webmasters. Today, it is an important ranking signal and vital to visitor experience. Regular updates to your website give you the ability to stay on top of new and emerging technological trends. For instance, it is now necessary to have a website that displays properly across multiple screens, such as a mobile phones and tablets. Modernized websites with superior technology are rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic.
Usable Links
Anybody familiar with SEO knows how important external links are to your website. Many times, the sites you are linking to can move or update features without leaving a redirect. Other times, they may go dormant or be completely removed. In any case, regular updates give you the chance to fix any broken or defective links on your site which is critical for SEO and repeat traffic.
There are others, but these are the six most important reasons to update your small business website regularly. If you do, you will be rewarded with more traffic and a higher conversion rate. Your site will also enjoy better indexing and higher rankings.