Essential corporate website maintenance

So, you finally have your website up and running, and it’s starting to generate some sales. Congratulations! But don’t get too comfortable and start thinking that you can now simply sit back, relax, and watch the sales roll in... Allowing your website to stagnate will undoubtedly hold back your business growth.

Far too many entrepreneurs mistakenly think that, once their website has launched, their input into it has come to an end – and this could not be farther from the truth. Apart from placing new products on the site, all too many businesses allow their websites to become static brochures that quietly slip away into obscurity: sliding down the search engine rankings and becoming lost in the throng – the void that exists beyond the first couple of pages of the search engine results. This is, of course, detrimental to business growth – but it can easily be avoided with effective and structured website maintenance.

A website lives and dies by its positioning within the search engines. While advertising, PR, and word-of-mouth are excellent promotional tools with which to encourage people to visit your website, search engine positioning is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for most web ventures facilitating their business growth.

Website maintenance includes all of the technical, social, and strategic developments to keep your website steadily moving forward to give your competition the sleepless nights that they deserve. The following are the leading maintenance ‘must’s that will ensure that your corporate website continues to promote business growth.

1. Technical maintenance – Every page of your website – every link and every function of its coding – should work. If it doesn’t, then there’s every possibility that search engines and potential customers alike will consider this reason enough to take less interest in you – and we don’t want that to happen. It’s important that you check the workings of your website at least once a month to locate errors quickly.
2. Optimisation maintenance – Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the art (or the science, depending on to whom you’re talking) of improving your visibility to search engines – and therefore the countless potential customers that they could be directing to your website. This is not a one-off task when you develop your website; rather, it’s an ongoing battle that involves establishing the most appropriate keywords for your sector, incorporating them within your website, constantly adding to the volume of copy on your site to incorporate these keywords and phrases, and much more. SEO is essential to your online business growth: the more often you update your copy with fresh, relevant, and keyword-optimised copy, the better – and doing so every day will be best of all.
3. Customer loyalty maintenance – Regular new copy is not only important for attracting the interest of search engines, but it’s also essential for helping to build customer loyalty, so that they’ll keep on coming back to buy from you time and time again. Add new pages to your website, post sector relevant news articles or RSS feeds, or – best of all – launch a corporate blog, so that you can stay in touch with your audience on a daily basis, posting news-related articles, information, industry changes, etc. Much business growth, even in these tough times, can be traced back to the customer loyalty that has been created by a good corporate blog.
4. Promotion maintenance – Wasted money is the biggest drain on your potential business growth. You must keep track of how well each form of promotion is performing and streamline your marketing efforts to focus on what’s working best, cutting out the dead wood. For the most effective online advertising, research, research, research to find the best avenues, wording, and monitoring methods available to you.
5. Relationship maintenance – Establishing relationships with other website and blog owners is an excellent way in which to increase your opportunities to place copy and advertising on their online offerings. These can contain links back to your website to enhance SEO and provide opportunities for business growth. Cultivating these partnerships through ongoing contact is an important part of maintaining your overall online presence.

Following these five ‘top tips’ for essential corporate website maintenance will help you to ensure that your site remains current, relevant, and interesting. It will increase your chances of moving up the search engine rankings, and it will encourage your customers to return again and again to see what new, exciting products, services, or information you’ve added to your site. And there is no better recipe for sustainable business growth than that.

Author – Bill Morrow:
Angels Den offers entrepreneurs with bright ideas or enterprises of any size the opportunity to meet with investors whose funds can help businesses to reach their true potential. Come to our website at www.angelsden.co.uk – it may well be the best business decision you’ll ever make.