Springtime is when we usually go through our houses, organize our belongings, fix anything that’s been broken for too long, and get rid of items that we no longer need. It’s also a good time to take the same energy and apply it to making updates to your website and overall online presence.
Making Important Website Updates
Your website is an ever evolving marketing tool that requires ongoing maintenance in order to be really effective. The search engines love an active website, and your audience loves it because it’s a reflection of your business. A static website represents a static business.
Throughout the year and especially now, take some time to make the following updates to your website:
- Remove any past events
- Add upcoming events and speaking engagements
- Freshen your client list and add any relevant case studies
- Review your product or service offerings and confirm the descriptions are still relevant
- Upload any recent presentations to slideshare.net and create a new landing page on your site
- Upload any recent videos to YouTube and create a new landing page on your site
Keeping your website fresh and updated will help your website visitors think of your business as being fresh and updated. Recent content updates position you as an innovator and someone who is in charge of their business and not the other way around with you website just out there as an after thought.
Making Important Online Presence Updates
In addition to updating your website, spring is also a good time to make sure your overall online presence is completely updated. Here are some things to check on your online presence that exist off your website and are visited by potential customers.
- Make sure your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts continue to reflect accurate information about your business and your profiles still appear the way you expect them to — Facebook and Twitter are still evolving their user experience, and you may need to make changes to your profile as well
- Search your name and your company in Google to make sure the majority of first page results are either under your control or reflect positive search results about you and your company
- Verify your profile on any local or industry directories you manage to make sure your information is up-to-date — especially important if you’ve changed locations or updated your product or service offerings
- Use a tool like Majestic SEO or Open Site Explorer to check on inbound links to your website from other sites — specifically, look at the anchor text other sites are using to link to you — if the anchor text does not contain your keywords phrases, reach out to those site owners with your preferred anchor text
- Claim your preferred username on any new social media sites that have appeared recently — you may not use the site now, but you’ll want to have your preferred username when you do become active on that site
These updates are all housekeeping items that are essential when managing an integrated and consistent online presence. Set aside some time this spring for some spring cleaning and make sure your website and overall online presence are telling the same story you tell people when you meet them in person.
What are you going to do this spring to update your online presence?
Image by jen_rab
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