Why a Website Should be Considered an Ongoing Work in Progress

September 14th 2015 | By Sarah McInerney

Do you remember the ‘old’ days when the only way to go about presenting your products or services involved putting together a printed brochure?

What an arduous job that was. You’d put your heart and soul into it, because you knew that once you’d signed it off, that was that. Hundreds or even thousands of copies would run off the press, and that was it: project complete.

Then websites took over and we welcomed a new way of showcasing our wares to a worldwide audience. At first, the system wasn’t that far removed from the whole brochure design process. Websites were static entities, so once you’d signed off your design it was job complete, just like the brochure.

Technology, browsing habits and trends never stop evolving, and a website must keep up.

Websites of today are fluid beings

Thankfully now things have moved on: considerably. The websites of today are fluid beings. You can login and change your content as you please. Add new images. Post videos. Blog and report news.

And this is how it should be. What you ‘can’ do is what you ‘should’ do. Websites these days are designed to let you keep them moving along. Technology, browsing habits and trends never stop evolving, and a website must keep up.

Website users are increasingly demanding. If they can’t find interesting, up to date content and features, they’ve got plenty of other places to go where they will find what they want. Google wants to see content being updated. When it does, it pays more visits and revises its listings, leading to better page rankings.

How to meet visitor – and Google – demand

So what can you do? In a nutshell:

1. Add plenty of relevant, interesting content such as blogs, articles and news. As we reported in a previous post on the importance of quality content for top search rankings, longer pieces are proving more popular with Google these days, and the search engine will be looking at how long visitors stay on a page as a measure of the relevance and interest of the content.
2. Update your most visited website pages with new material so it’s bang up to date. Things change, and so should your content.
3. Keep galleries stocked with new images, and don’t forget to label them with keyword relevant tags.
4. Introduce video content: regularly. Video is massively overtaking all other forms of content as the most engaging. As we discussed in a previous post about video marketing, 73% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase after watching a video and 96% find videos helpful for making online purchase decisions. Plus the chances of achieving a page one Google listing increases 53 times when there’s a video involved and using video on key landing pages boosts up conversion rates by as much as 80%.

Add content, add images, add video, then add some more.

Always consider your website a work in progress. Don’t just sign it off as if it was a printed brochure: keep it evolving. Technology, trends and habits never stand still, and neither should your website.