What’s the big deal about changing anything on your website, especially if you’re just offering services that don’t change?
Well, your website’s appearance, functionality, and content play a pivotal role in leaving a lasting impression and engaging your audience. If your website always looks the same every time a person visits it, the customer will wonder if you’re updating your services at all. After all, there are changes in every field. For example, nail salons have websites. You may think nail salons only offer manicures and pedicures. But there are always new trends in nail design, so you want to show repeat customers you know about them, and can perform them.
The same is true for house cleaning websites. There are always new products, and new studies about the safety of house cleaning products. Show you know about these changes, by updating your website. Here are ten crucial steps to help you maintain a modern and fresh website.
Table of Contents
Regular Content Updates
Keeping your content fresh shows you’re paying attention to industry trends. Making regular updates to your blog, news section, or product listings not only provide value to your visitors but also improve your website’s search engine rankings. Search engines prefer websites that consistently publish new, relevant content. When Google crawls sites, it notes how often there’s been a new addition to a website, whether that’s a blog post or product listing. When they see this, they give your site extra points, which can lead to increased organic traffic and higher visibility in search results.
User Experience Optimization
A user-friendly experience is vital to keeping visitors engaged on your website. Regularly review and update the site’s design, navigation, and functionality to ensure it aligns with the latest web design trends and best practices. For example, there used to be a trend to have rotating photo slideshows. Now, people don’t do that as much as it makes websites load slower. When websites load slowly, Google deducts points from a website, and place it lower in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Make regular changes to your website so that it loads quickly, and offers a pleasing experience on both desktop and mobile devices.
Security Updates
Website security is massively important. Even if you don’t deal with sensitive information, you need to make sure you update your website’s software, plugins, and security measures to protect it from vulnerabilities and potential threats. Outdated software is a common target for hackers, so staying up to date with the latest security patches is crucial if you maintain customer data, like credit card numbers. Even if you don’t, a virus on your site can make load slower, which again, affects SERP.
Broken Links and Errors
Broken links and 404 error pages can harm your website’s user experience and affect its search engine rankings. Regularly check for broken links, missing pages, and other errors using tools like Google Search Console or third-party website auditing tools. We often perform link audits for our customers on a regular basis. We use 301 redirects when we spot broken links.
Speed Optimization
Slow-loading websites can result in high bounce rates and negatively impact your SEO rankings. Regularly optimize your website for speed by compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and minimizing code. If you don’t know how to do these things, you can hire a third party vendor like SEO Design Chicago. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can provide valuable insights and recommendations for improving your website’s speed.
Social Media Integration
You should have social media platforms and use them to reach audiences that aren’t necessarily looking at your website. Place social media icons on your website so that they’re visible and accessible. Make sure you drive content to your website from your social media accounts by inserting links into captions (when the platform allows it, as X, TikTok and Facebook do) or place your website link in the bio (For Instagram). Use hashtags that include your company’s name too.
SEO Review and Enhancement
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process. Regularly review your website’s SEO so that each page has meta titles and descriptions, uses relevant keywords, and includes alt tags for each image. Monitor your website’s search performance using tools like Google Analytics and adjust your strategy accordingly. This is the most important way to get people to click on your website. We handle SEO for most of our many satisfied clients. 
Content Management System (CMS) Updates
If your website is built on a content management system like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or others, ensure that both the CMS and its plugins are up to date. CMS updates often include security patches, bug fixes, and new features that can enhance your website’s speeds and usability. If you don’t know where to find such updates in your CMS, we can show you or handle this task for you.
Feedback and Testing
Gathering feedback from users and conducting regular testing on different versions of each page is crucial to identify issues and areas for improvement. We conduct A/B testing on users then show you their results to help you figure out where to place or add call-to-action buttons, forms, and page layouts. We can handle the designing, and finding users.
Monitor Analytics and Set Goals
To keep your website updated effectively, you must monitor its performance and set clear goals. Your main goal is to increase sales, but not every user will do that. So think about other goals that may eventually lead to this goal. Some other goals include getting visitors to visit your site more than once, sign up for marketing alerts, inquire about services or place items in a cart. We use tools like Google Analytics to track visitor behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates. Based on this data, we help you see if you’ve reached the goals you had, and how you can if the data shows you have not done so yet. We’ll also help you figure out other goals.
Websites should be living digital documents. They are not the original copy of the Constitution, a document that can’t be edited or changed without undergoing massive scrutiny. Your website should be updated often in small ways – like adding blog posts or products – and larger ways – like complete redesigns.
We can help you do all of these things, according to a budget and timeframe that realistically works for you. We have a dedicated team of content creators, web developers, website designers and analysts to tackle all things website related.
Why is website maintenance important?
Starting a website is easy, especially with Wix. But maintaining a website takes more effort, and that’s why so many businesses turn to third party vendors, like us at SEO Design Chicago. 
How Hard is it to Maintain a Website?
Maintaining a website takes work. And if you already have too much work, let us handle your website maintenance. If your site is simple, maintaining it may only take an hour or two each month. For more complex sites, it can take up to ten hours per month. As a rule of thumb, you should redesign your website every 6 months to two years.
What Does SEO Design Chicago Charge for Website Updates?
We usually do monthly maintenance for our clients. We start by conducting a free SEO audit of your site. Then, we’ll talk about how we can fix issues on a one-time basis, or on an ongoing basis. If your budget is tight, and your site is simple, you may be able to get away with bimonthly maintenance. When it comes to content creation, we suggest posting at least one new blog post per week.
By regularly updating content, optimizing user experience, ensuring security, fixing errors, improving speed, highlighting social media, enhancing SEO, updating your CMS, seeking feedback on design, and monitoring analytics, you can keep your website in top shape. Reach out to learn more.
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