This week on our podcast, we are talking about managing your website and keeping it relevant – both technically as in how you manage it, what plugins you use (if it’s WordPress) but also keeping it relevant in terms of your content.
As we’ve discussed before, a decision needs to be made on whether to manage it yourself or pay someone else to manage it for you and whether you have the time available to be able to do that on a regular basis. It’s easy to underestimate the time involved, so our first tip is to make sure that you don’t use content that dates easily. Outdated content can actually work against you so it’s probably better not to have that blog there at all in that case.
Planning ahead can really help and using a tool such as a content calendar is a great way to do this. You can either use an offline calendar, or use a WordPress plugin to integrate this into your site. Thinking about your content in advance makes it much more likely to happen.
The next thing you could do is to look back at your old content and bring it up to date. For example, you wrote an article about how you were managing your business during lockdown – you could revisit that and say how much of that was true, how much of those processes are applicable now.
You could write a new article in reference to an old one and recycle the content. If you spend a lot of time on something and it’s good and you’ve got it as a written article and it’s on your blog, you might want to consider taking a snippet and turning it into an infographic. Maybe you could turn a PowerPoint slide into an animation or a podcast into a 30 second read!
Repurposing content that is relevant and that you have worked hard on can give it more longevity as can looking for inspiration for new ideas based on existing articles.
Sharing your opinion on things that are topical and interesting can help you to move past starting on a blank page – research articles and facts on subjects that interest you and that you can link to your business.
Using a tool such as Google Search Console can help you to try to see how people are finding your website, what search phrases they’re using which you can then build into your content to maximise opportunities for SEO. When you write a blog article, Google sees that as a new individual page on your website and so sees your website expand..
We’ve already talked quite a lot about website design if you want to keep it fresh and relevant, it doesn’t need to be that complicated, it could just be updating your imagery and making sure it’s mobile friendly.
So our top tip on keeping your website relevant is to really work out the cost of doing things yourself. So many people forget that their time is also money. Cost it out realistically.
Join us for our next 30 second read where we talk about search engines and ensuring search engines can find your site. Or listen to the full episode of this Podcast.
