On this episode of the Content Machine podcast, we’re going to look at the five things you should update on your website right now. There might be more stuff you need to update, but these five things would be a great starting place to make sure you’re looking good online. Number one, dates and times. Do you have any dates and times on your website? Open hours, closed for the holidays. You might want to set a reminder to check these annually. And even if you don’t have any date or times on your website, is the copyright year in your footer up to date? Sometimes these are easy to forget about and are not updated. The second thing you should look at is meta tags. Are your meta tags up to date? If they are, are they still relevant for the terms for your business? Does it have the key terms that your business is trying to promote and potentially the location that you’re trying to promote in? And do you have meta tags on all the key pages of your website? When’s the last time you looked at your meta tags and made sure that they were relevant for your business? The third thing is if you have a lead generator on your website, and I think you should, which is some sort of a free download tool that will help people build trust with you because you’re providing free value through this content. When is the last time you updated it? Probably not since you launched this current iteration of your website. So take a look at it. Is it still relevant to your customers? Is it still a good representation of your business? Would a design–refresh make it feel more modern, or does it need to be torn down and built from the ground up? Use this as an opportunity to check out that resource. Number four, is the main message of your site targeting your current customers’ wants and needs, or is it out of date? We look at lots of websites for customers and their competitors, and sometimes people fail to update this messaging over time as their business evolves. When’s the last time you considered if your marketing messaging on your website is accurate? Number five, is your website using too many stock photos or using bad stock photography? Stock photography can hurt customer trust and distract from the point that you’re trying to make of who you are as a company. If you asked a couple random customers, would they think that your use of stock photos helps or hurts your website’s communications? Maybe try to look at your website with the eyes of an outsider and see if some new local real photography could help your customers appreciate your brand more. Now, here’s one as a bonus. Number six. And this one is probably the most widespread that we see. Are your staff up to date on your website? Are Are bios current? Are there photos within the last decade? All of these things change for people: how they look, what their qualifications are, who’s working somewhere. It’s really easy for people to forget about updating these or neglecting these over time. So maybe annually, if you haven’t recently checked, make a reminder to make sure that the biographies and the photos are relevant for the staff on your website. These are just a couple of things that we see on a regular basis that people need to update on their websites. If you need help updating your website or maybe creating new photography to go on there or dialing in your messaging to speak to your customers, we would love to help you. So feel free to reach out to me at kevin@adelsburgermarketing.com and see some examples of our work at adelsburgermarketing.com.
