So, you’ve got your website all designed and produced and up on the Net. Bring on the new clients! Aside from sitting back and booking new appointments or shipping out your environmentally friendly products, you’re done, right? Well… no.
Oh, right, maybe do a little marketing of the site, get some incoming links, let the world know your site’s out there, and then you can start getting results. That’s it, now, right? Uh, not quite.
Okay, enough of this imaginary two-person conversation…
Keep ’em coming back
Yes, it may be true that you can take a bit of a break and rest on your (or your web designer’s) laurels for a short while, but if you want your website to really get results, you need to think about the long term. Keep in mind that on the Web the “long term” may only be a few years. If you haven’t touched your site in that time, it will have gotten very stale and you’ll probably have witnessed the number of visitors to your site decreasing and the results diminishing by the week.
If you want people to return to your site on a regular basis and for Google and other search engines to consider your site worthy, you’ll need to update its content, at the very least, every three months. That should be the bare minimum.
It may not be easy or practical to change the content on the existing pages of your site very often. But just about every business or organization, large or small, can publish articles on its website on a regular basis – whether that’s every day, week, month, or quarter. There’s always something you can write about that will be of interest to your target audience.
Not only does issuing articles give your clients (and potential clients) a reason to come back to your site on a regular basis, but each article increases your site’s overall amount of content. And, if the topics are varied enough, each time you publish an article on your site, that will be one (or more than one) new way for Google to find your site.
Be specific
Let’s say you have an environmentally friendly building company. If done properly, your site should get picked up by the search engines for terms such as “environmentally friendly building,” “environmentally friendly architecture,” “green building,” (plus your geographic region) and so on.
That’s all good. But, what about industry- or region- specific issues? Your site may not be ranking highly for as many of these as it can. Especially if there are new issues popping up all the time. That’s where articles come in handy.
Sticking with our example, perhaps one month you can write about new solar panel technology. If written and linked well, this article may ranked highly by Google for search terms such as “solar panels,” “using solar energy in buildings,” etc. Since your article focuses on solar panels in particular, it should (all other things being equal) have a much better chance of ranking high than another site that simply mentions solar energy among many items on a diluted page. Google will see that your article page offers specific information about the topic of solar panels used in building.
Location, location, location
The same sort of idea is true if your target audience is, say, Victoria, and you write an article about building specifically in harmony with Victoria’s ecology. Doing so would potentially get your site ranked well for search terms such as “eco-friendly building Victoria” or “Victoria ecologically sound houses” or “green architecture in Victoria.”
It may seem like a chore to come up with new ideas and write on a regular basis. However, you’ll soon see that the possibilities are endless. Just think of information that you would find useful or interesting if you were a customer. Or make a list of common questions that your clients ask.
As for finding the time to write, just commit to setting aside a specific, regular time. For example, if you decide that you’re going to put out a new article every month, why not designate the last Friday morning of the preceding month to write it? Or whatever works with your schedule. Once you make the commitment it’s not too difficult to stick with it. In time, the effort will pay off with more traffic to your site, more repeat traffic, and, ultimately, more business.