Updating our websites is a crucial part of not just the user experience, but also our website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Without new content, there is nothing new for search engines to crawl and index, so over time our rankings can drop.
What happens when your rankings drop? The most common problem is that your website will no longer be returned very high in organic search results, which could mean lost website traffic and lost revenue for your business. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste, simply because you’re not sure how to keep your website updated with new content.
If you’re blogging regularly, you automatically are creating new content and search engines will love you and reward you with better organic search rankings.
But what if you just have a brochure site and aren’t regularly blogging? Of course it’s even harder to come up with new content in this scenario, but there are ways you can add fresh and new content to a brochure site to help overcome this obstacle. Check out my top 6 ideas below!
Update your About or Team page
If you have a staff or team members, this is much easier, but even if it’s just a page about you and the roots of your business, you can still modify from time to time to keep things interesting and new. If you have a team, use individual photos with captions instead of a group photo and be sure to keep this up to date! There is nothing worse than visiting a website that has a team member who left 2 years ago!
If it’s just you, update your brand images every 2-3 years (professional brand photography is well worth the cost), and read through your content to see what might have changed, or how you can change things up and reword the content for better readability and flow. Even if it’s just a page about you and the roots of your business, you can still modify from time to time to keep things interesting and new. If you have a team, use individual photos instead of a group photo and be sure to keep this up to date! Nothing worse than visiting a website that has a team member who left 2 years ago!
Add an FAQ page to your site
These are GREAT pages for value added SEO content and you can add new questions as they come up in your business, thereby giving you another way to change up existing content in the future. Think about the things that customers or prospects always ask you, and answer those questions on your FAQ page. Not only is this great for SEO, but you can help squash any indecisiveness someone might have about working with you.
Add new testimonials
This is a super easy way to change out content! If you don’t already have testimonials on your site, stop what you’re doing and ADD THEM NOW! These are great social proof (which search engines love), you can provide an external link to the person leaving the testimonial as an added incentive for providing it, and you can add and change them any time you need to. If you haven’t yet gathered testimonials or reviews for your business, invite clients to leave a Google review on your Google Business Profile page, or just ask a few of your current clients to send you a testimonial. Typically they’re more than happy to provide you with a testimonial and would love a link back to their own site, if they have one.
Change out or add new images sitewide
If you have a simple brochure site, then you probably don’t have so many images that it would take too much time to change them up. Whether it’s a portfolio that needs updating, new horses for sale, new parallax scrolling images, etc., changing images is a great way to keep things fresh and up to date. Be sure to add ALT tags to images to help with SEO and website accessibility.
Revisit your products or services page and update your descriptions
As you work to improve your services and refine your processes and offerings, scan through your existing content and see what can be updated to give users a better idea of how you can help them. Be sure to add the benefit to them, as opposed to just the features of the product or service, so they get a clear understanding of how YOU are the one to solve their problem.
Get behind the video craze
Video is where it’s at for marketing in 2022, and it’s not just for social media! If you’re not into writing for a blog, have you ever considered a video blog? Writing can require some skill that not all of us have, and while you may think videos are difficult and you feel awkward in front of the camera, you will get better with practice. Your videos do not have to be long to be effective. In fact, some people prefer more “bite-sized” videos, because they just don’t have the time to watch anything too in-depth. Think about quick tips you can provide that will help your audience with anything from barn hacks, riding or training tips, equipment maintenance… the possibilities are endless here! The bonus is your videos can pull double-duty because you WILL be sharing them to your social media pages as well!
So how do search engines know if you’ve changed up your content?
If you’re using WordPress and you have an SEO plugin such as All in One SEO Pack, it will create a sitemap for you and automatically submit it to search engines on a regular basis, depending on your plugin settings.
If you’re not using WordPress, you can manually create a sitemap with outside builders and then resubmit it when you make changes, to be sure that it’s picked up by search engines.
These are just a handful of ideas to get you thinking about how you can routinely change up your content to give search engines something new to crawl. The added bonus here is it gives your website visitors a better understanding into what you do and how you can solve their problems, and the user experience is truly what search engines care about.
BONUS TIP!
While updating your site once a month would be ideal, sometimes that just isn’t reality! Update your site using one of these tips every other month, for a full years worth of updates!
