Did you ever look around your house and notice layers of dust collecting on things when you get too busy to get the deep cleaning done? What kind of feeling does it give you when you look at it? If you are having a big party and inviting everyone over, do you want your house to be dusty and outdated?
The same thing can happen when you let your website gather dust. You’re so excited to go live or complete a major update or launch a new product. You want the look and content to be strong, you want your blog to be relevant and consistent, and you want everyone to see what you brought to life. Right?
Then, somewhere along the line, you get busy focusing on other things in the business and your website starts to become outdated and isn’t aligned with your current state of business. If you aren’t paying attention, you could go for months or years without updating elements of your website that keep you relevant. Even a “brochure” type of website needs to be reviewed on some type of regular basis (even annually is better than nothing), and basic things need to be checked.
Here are a few examples of things that get outdated:
- Blog articles get old and sometimes are no longer relevant. It’s also easy to come to someone’s website and see they haven’t written anything new for a long time.
- The copyright could be out of date. A first impression may be that no one at your company is paying attention to the details.
- Your contact information reflects an old address.
- Automatic or necessary website updates could have happened on auto that broke things on your website without you knowing it. Tech is constantly changing and updating and most website platforms require you to update once in a while to prevent being hacked. Even if you do this on auto, there’s no guarantee that it will always work well with your platform.
- Your website is noted as not secure.
- Team pages have employees who’ve left the company.
When websites get dusty, here are a few things that can happen:
- Anyone who visits the site including potential referral partners, vendors, potential employees, or potential clients will notice. The chance to make a good first impression is lost.
- You leave yourself open to copyright infringement.
- Your credibility as a company is damaged. Do you want to be conducting business with someone whose website is not secure? Does that raise concerns over their other business practices?
- Outside factors may have changed that make you liable to a lawsuit or break your website. For example, the GDPR laws from the EU affected everyone around the world, so privacy policies had to change. Another example is that Google changed its algorithm last year, and everyone who had the geolocation plugin (the thing that lets people click on your location for directions) had to update it or it would remain broken. It was a universal change.
- You aren’t giving yourself a chance to be optimized by Google because you are doing nothing to get found. This could close off opportunities to boost your local business presence. Most people at least have an inkling about this one.
I know what you are thinking. You are SO busy. Your website is your most important marketing asset. If you don’t have the time or expertise to keep it current, then consider securing a marketing partner. As our clients’ outsourced marketing department, For Marketing Matters has content development strategies for our clients where we develop quality, relevant content for regular, monthly content updates to their website. Software updates are monitored and managed to address universal changes as well as software updates to keep the website functioning appropriately.
I am allergic to dust, really. Make it a priority to keep it current and monitor the benefits. Now that is a topic for another blog!