Mar
6
2014
 

Keep it Fresh: 5 Ways to Maintain Your Web Presence Without Losing Your Mind

Your web presence is a living, breathing being. In order to remain effective it must be nurtured and maintained. Unfortunately, many small businesses spend lots of time and effort establishing a web presence only to let it fizzle and die over time. A stale web presence not only sends the wrong message to your customers, but it can also be bad news for your search engine rankings.

Consider these five tips to maintain a fresh web presence without driving yourself crazy:

1. Use Analytics

If you are dealing with time constraints, you can use analytics to determine where you should focus your maintenance efforts. Although it’s always best to keep your entire digital presence updated, sometimes there simply isn’t enough time. If the majority of your traffic is going to your home page and your blog, then focus on updating these areas first. If you aren’t sure how to use analytics, please contact us and we’ll guide you through it. 

2. Schedule Content Updates

We covered this in last week’s post about creating a content strategy. Regularly posting quality content will keep customers happy and also drive traffic to your website. This can be very time-consuming and sometimes nearly impossible if you don’t have a dedicated staff member. Set aside a few days a month to take care of content creation and schedule automatic updates. Both Facebook and Twitter now offer native tools that allow you to schedule future posts.

3. Stay Evergreen

If you struggle to maintain a fresh web presence, then make it a point to stick to evergreen content. Stay away from topics that will date your site such as news, trends, statistics, and mentions of specific seasons or dates. Content that will provide long-term value to your customers is both interesting and evergreen.

4. Check out the Competition

When you first launched your social media campaign and website, your digital presence was shiny, modern, and new. You may not even realize that it’s time for an update, because you still see it that way! Take some time to check out your competition. This not only gives you valuable perspective, but you may also realize that your website looks ancient in comparison.

5. Outsource

If maintaining your web presence seems like a lot of work, that’s because it is. Many businesses don’t have the time or resources to take on these tasks in-house. Outsourcing your web-presence strategy is one of the best ways to stay fresh without going nuts!

Ask your favorite web shop if they have a subscription service. They will more than likely be happy to work proactively with you on your web presence rather than perform web triage a couple of times a year. This will allow you to keep your web presence relevant and effective without having to worry about the details. The best part is, you’ll still have time to focus on what’s most important: running your business.

Comments
2 Comments
  1. Stacey Herbert March 8, 2014 at 8:20 am #

    Although not new functionality, I’ve only just discovered the ability to schedule Facebook updates directly within the platform. Not only has it saved me time on busy days, but it has allowed me to be more strategic with post timings.

    • Grady Sibert March 10, 2014 at 6:07 pm #

      Hi Stacey, not sure how much content you publish or whether or not you use WordPress but you may want to checkout http://coschedule.com/ . It takes content scheduling to a whole new level, we love it.

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