“Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom.”
In most cases, your website is the first impression you make to your prospective client. For as long as technology is within the scope of what we now experience, it is your showroom. Your website has got to be excellent all the time, and it has to change regularly to keep leads flowing in. Adding blog posts, refreshing content wording, and adding photos and videos, are essential updates you need to make to maintain your website’s vitality.
Adding and pruning important features
For a website to generate healthy interest in your services, someone needs to update it religiously. While your webmaster handles everything on your site to optimize its look and user-friendliness, the person in charge of its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ought to be regularly making adjustments to improving its Google rankings. That way, more people find and visit your site, then use it for its primary purpose of generating business.
Whether your website changes weekly or less often, if two people are handling these jobs, they need to be communicating regularly with each other to sync the language used at both ends of website management. As a result of their synchronization, your website remains fresh and accurate so that organic searches made by potential clients are landing on your site first.
Since Google changes the way language affects search results, you want to make sure the keywords you use are consistent. It is advisable for you and your website team to select 10 to 15 keywords that rank regularly with Google and use those keywords routinely. You never want your site to slip from the top of search result rankings.
If your web developer and SEO person are not coordinating the language used on the site, you may be left behind in terms of searchability, and then find out too late that your organic search rankings have plummeted.
To ensure that your content stays relevant, it should change consistently, and often. Whether your content is being updated by a weekly industry tip blog or photos of newly finished kitchens on social media, stimulate your site traffic with compelling, new material at regular intervals that are not too far apart from each other. Even adding pages to your website can be the right move to make. If your business is expanding from a bright idea, demonstrate this to your readers by adding pages to your website that illustrate your company’s growth.
The effects of updating content
What you offer your clients, and how quickly prospects can see this, determines the business you will generate online. You can have your site’s SEO analyzed for free here.
With varying regularity, Google bots called “spiders” crawl through your website to see what content has changed. Spiders note changes to your site which will alter your ranking, giving your site a higher or lower domain authority. Usually, the more often you make changes to your site, the sooner Google bots crawl through it to update your changes and re-rank your content of the changed pages. Google ranks by the page, not the website. So when making adjustments to improve your domain authority (DA), focus on boosting the DA ranking of the pages that matter to you the most. However, be aware that increasing your DA does not happen instantly and can actually take years of work.
When a page is moved or deleted, and there is no direct replacement for it, a 404 error message will appear in place of the content a user expects to find. 404 messages are frustrating to users because they indicate that a website does not have everything in place to make it function as it’s intended to. For this reason, it’s best to be certain that your site is page-error-free because these errors will have a negative impact on your Google site ranking. Eliminating the 404 error as quickly as possible is critical, as 404s are the kiss of death for a small business website.
Regular blogging is a crucial element to your website
Blogs should be written every week and posted on the same day at the same time of day. Hiring a writer to handle your blogs or your website content can save you many hours of time. What would you do with a spare 10 or 20 hours each week? Clearly, the need, length, and quality of the blog denote the time it takes to write it.
In 2021, experts advise that a high-quality blog containing substantial, relevant content should run 1,760—2,400 words in length to optimally generate traffic to your site. That’s seven-to-ten pages of writing. Factor research and proofreading into that time investment and you’ll find 15-20 hours will be required to complete the task.
Professional writers are often more skilled with wording content than the average business person, and with good reason: their job requires it. They are focused on your business while you are busy handling it. Hiring a writer is buying the time — and the assurance — that your professional image remains competitive to the inflow of traffic to your site, while you and your staff are busy assisting the clients you already have. To ensure your site content remains competitive, consider hiring someone to blog once a week to keep your page content fresh.
Lang’s Kitchens & Baths keeps 10 keywords on hand and uses at least one for each blog. A good writer will capture your business’s image in industry-specific language through shared data and research. They need to follow Google’s standard keyword density which is currently 1%-2%. For instance, if “kitchen remodeling” is the keyword that you want to use, every 1000 words of a blog needs to contain the term “kitchen remodeling” between 10 to 20 times! A good blogger will take those industry-specific keywords, and skillfully weave them throughout the content, resulting in subtle, natural phrasing.
You might develop up to 12 topics per quarter, and then select six of those topics to be written into blogs, where your keywords are written into each of those topics.
Posting photos and video content
As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to post photos of at least one job per month; six to twelve photos that show off your best, recent work. Post additional, business-related photos once a week. Choose a day of the week to add them, and do it at the same time of the day consistently. When Google bots see the new work on your site, they rescan and re-rank it.
Forbes’ prediction in 2018 — that video will be the next important aspect to SEO — has come true. Video is very important. You should have videos thoroughly integrated into your website and be taking the time to refresh them monthly. Testimonial videos are a great way to do this. They show the prosperity of your business and the new faces of people who are happy — hopefully ecstatic — about the work you did for them.
Get testimonies from your best jobs. Show off your work with glimpses of the designs you made for these customers. Then post those once or twice a month on your site, as well as on social media platforms that link back to your website. Choose people who are natural in front of the camera. It takes an outgoing, charismatic person to resonate with the audience when recorded on video. Be sure to get video testimonials from clients who exhibit this personality type when talking on camera. It’s not just an endorsement; it’s a performance.
Good web management means more backlinks
When you’ve spent time, energy, and money turning out great content for your business, you want the pages of your website that you’re most proud of to be ranked higher by Google. In order to leverage your content advancements, getting backlinks from quality websites with high domain authority rankings is your next step.
Often the best place to start is getting links to your homepage by creating citations for your business on local directories. In such directories, you’d enter your business’s name, address, and phone number [NAP] which will increase your business’s visibility locally. If you’ve already done this, or prefer to start elsewhere, try one of the following techniques:
- Build up your backlinks by creating resources through link web building. This technique will get you backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful resources for your industry.
- Utilize the skyscraper technique. There are three principals to using it. First, find popular content that has already been linked from other sites. Second, find relevant content that already has a nice list of backlinks. Then, improve upon that content with your own, and connect with those currently linked to the original link whose content you improved upon, asking them to link to your content instead.
Being a leader isn’t only about being purely innovative. It also comes from being the first choice of the buyer. When you’re generating exciting, fresh content for your site on a weekly basis, your website will stand well above the competition. You will end up winning all the best clients.
—John A. Lang, LPBC
