Let’s get one thing straight: no one has time to update their web site.
You are not alone in thinking it’s just one more thing you really cannot squeeze into your week. After all, you probably spent dozens of hours working on it when you launched it, and you’re already overloaded doing social media and answering email and all kinds of other tasks for which you can’t bill anyone. Especially at the end of the year, when tax deadlines and holidays and — depending on where you live — de-icing your car are all higher priorities, it can feel nearly impossible to carve out time to keep your site updated.
Sadly, the engines of the internet require you to do regular upkeep on your site if you want to maintain their attention. A drop off in traffic can often be traced directly to a lull in updates. This post will give you a list of updates you can make to your site in less than fifteen minutes — website quickies!
Add a testimonial or review
Did someone say something nice about your business or organization this week? Ask his or her permission to share it on your web site! Add it to your sidebar, as a pullquote on your home page somewhere, or on your Contact page.
Add a project to your portfolio
Whenever we finish a new project, we add the client name to our portfolio pages. It takes about two minutes for us — just a link and a few words about what we did for that client. Depending on your business, you could add an image or a brief description of the work, or just the link to the client’s web site. The powers-that-be at search engines can see that the page was updated. Win!
Blog about your blog
What?! you say. But I can’t write a blog post in fifteen minutes! It takes MUCH longer than that!
Ah, not necessarily! Have you done a lot of blogging about a particular topic? Create a curated “best-of” blog post, listing your favorite posts in that subject area. A few lines of text introducing the topic are all you need to tie it all together. Your audience may have changed since you first published these posts, and so they’ll be new to some people. Those who have seen them before may be glad of the reminder.
Add resources
Do you have a list of favorite vendors? Books or videos you think would be useful to your customers? Add a page to your site where you can easily add more when they come to mind. This list can be annotated, or not.
Say hello!
If you have welcome-type messaging on your home page, when was the last time you revisited it? If you notice in your logs that you get a lot of repeat visits to your home page, it’s a good idea to shake things up there every so often. Reword your greeting, either to make it seasonal (“Services to Add Warmth to Your Business This Winter”) or to update it for changes to your industry (“Learn More About How 2014 Tax Guidelines Affect Your Charitable Giving”).
None of these changes should take you longer than fifteen minutes. You can fit one in between shoveling your driveway and jumping onto that 9:30 am conference call, and the effect it will have on your search engine ranking and the perceived vitality of your business will last a lot longer than the time it took out of your day.
Need help getting yourself a web site that really is this easy to update? We can help! Send us an email, or reach out on Facebook or Twitter.