It’s easy to let your web content slip once you’ve established a firm presence online with a site, storefront, and various social media accounts. But the content can quickly become stagnant if you aren’t keeping an eye on current industry trends and news.
One of the worst forms of inactivity occurs when your business information goes out of date: You can quickly lose business if your phone number changes and it’s not corrected on your Google Plus profile and website.
Stagnant content can also pull down your search engine rankings, as Google crawls and prioritizes fresher, accurate content. Businesses can’t just watch the world go by; they must take an active role to stay relevant with search engines and audiences.
The content-refreshing techniques below can help you stay afloat in an ocean of competitors; they can pull up your rankings and increase your audience reach.
1. Out with the old
The first step is to update your current web content. You don’t want to jump into crafting new blog posts and web pages just yet, because outdated content will get lost in the fray.
Take a fine-toothed comb to your website copy. Look under the hood and see if your meta tags, titles, navigation, and URLs accurately represent your company’s current services and products.
Launch an FTP program and scour your website’s directories. Make sure you don’t have any old, unlinked web pages still accessible online. Even if they’re not connected to your site’s main navigation, these old pages can still appear in search results and confuse customers.
Next, log on to all your company’s social media accounts. Look at every profile detail, and don’t take anything for granted. Examine contact information and update as needed.
Businesses can quickly lose money if their contact channels are marred with outdated information or typos. Double-check the descriptions in these profiles.
Do they feature all your brand’s current products and services? Your company has probably grown since you first created these accounts, and your social media audiences should be able to see this growth.
2. Edit for credibility
We’re living in an age when netspeak is becoming the standard style of communication online.
For example, grammatical rules for the word “because” are shifting, thanks to popular online usage. Traditionally, “because” was known as a subordinating conjugation, but now it’s also recognized as a preposition by linguists.
However, these shifts in language still offer no excuse for misspellings, grammatical faux pas, and typos in your company copy. Your credibility is at stake, if you post content that hasn’t been edited first.
3. Post strong titles and meta descriptions
Your SEO strategy requires a fine blend of fresh content, keywords, titles, and meta descriptions.
Simply put, the title is what shows up in the link text on your search engine listings. It’s crucial for you to create strong titles that state the purpose of the content right away, since longer titles are shortened with ellipses.
The meta description is the plain text that appears beneath the listing link. It gives search engine users further information about the content.
As you build web pages and post new blog articles, the goal is to say a lot with just a few words. Meta descriptions and web page titles are meant to be pithy, since search engine users are skimming results to find content relevant to their needs.
You must demonstrate the value of your content by highlighting key points and calls to action within the title and meta description.
4. Provide up-to-date, authoritative news
The best way to attract regular traffic to your website, blog, and social media accounts is to post authoritative information on a regular basis. Your fans and followers will come to regard your operation as not just a business, but a reliable news source.
You can cultivate this type of audience relationship by sticking to a blog update schedule. Collaborate with other industry leaders and ask them to write guest posts for your company. Your in-house experts can also trade articles with other well-respected publications.
The idea is to get links to your webpage placed on other authority websites. Guest blogging is a great way to do this, because your webpage URL will appear in your author byline.
The biggest sign of web presence health is a steady stream of new, high-quality content. You cannot engage with audiences effectively unless you provide them with accurate information and current news. Work with your social media and marketing teams to craft compelling and relevant copy for your website, social media accounts, and blog.