What happens if I do nothing on my website?

The title of this blog is slightly back to front as we are often asked the question ‘why is it important to be constantly adding to my website?’, often it comes in the form of a question about our content services and sometimes it is just a need for information but ultimately in this blog we are discussing what happens to a dormant site? What happens when you launch a site and just leave it?

Well, firstly, it is worth giving context as, for many, a website is something you need for your business but, in the first instances, it might not be where you gain most of your business. For example, you may have an established business based on leads and may have launched a website because you need somewhere for prospective customers to see who you are, this is perfectly normal.

It is prudent to draw some parallels here, to helpfully give context to how a website should be viewed, to expand on the idea of a website being something you need for more than just a ‘brochure’. To ask, ‘Why is it important to keep adding to my site’ is the same as saying ‘why do I need to add information to my shop window?’ or ‘Why do I need a sales brochure?’ or ‘Why do I need a customer service phone number?’ – your website is so much more than an initial brochure, it is an information sharing portal for your products and services, it is a sales journey, it is a way in which you can increase brand awareness and therefore increase sales / leads.

So would you launch a shop in the high street and just leave it as is? Would you not advertise sales in the window? Offer information in store to help purchases? Would you not train your staff to be able to handles sales and enquiries? There are very few instances within sales and marketing where doing nothing is the best way forward.

To break it down a little more, here are four reasons why doing nothing could be disadvantageous and in some cases be hurting your brand.

1. SEO / Optimisation

In the first instance, if you do not have a SEO / online marketing strategy or if your website is not optimised, you will be restricting your site in terms of how well it could work for you. If you follow a simple optimisation process based on well researched and effective keywords, your site will start top achieve keyword rankings that will drive traffic to your site.

2. Search Engines

Google (and the other major search engines) NEED to have the latest version of your website within its search results, it can not afford to have old pages / information in its search index or users will stop using the search engine. It therefore has a very efficient ‘bot’ that crawls your site and ensures it has all the live pages in its index. If the bot visits your website on several occasions and nothing has changed, the bot comes less frequently, why use up important resource on crawling the same site? So, the more you change it and add to it, the more the bot must crawl your site to keep information fresh in its index.

3. Content

Adding content is vital to the progression of your website, your business moves forward and therefore your website should reflect this. Again, using the analogy of a shop, your business may have seasons, it may have new products and services, it will have different offline marketing strategies to help drive people into the shop, the same applies online, a static site will only perform so well, Google and the other major search engines look for how a site ‘broadcasts’ its message, how users engage with the site and other platforms, this is their way of seeing how engaging a site is and how important it is to the community and sector the site is associated with.

4. Engagement

Engagement is important on so many levels, customer engagement is obviously the most important, if you are not giving people a reason to engage with you, you don’t get the chance to enter the consideration and awareness stage of their buying process. By asking and answering important questions to your prospective buyers, you naturally put yourself in the running for a sale. Not to mention the search engines want to see you are engaging and helping your customers and visitors and the fact that brand awareness comes from users engaging with your message on a variety of different platforms, add content, share on socials, get into the buying process of your customers.

Ultimately its very simple; if you understand the power of your website, understand that its not an extension of your business but it IS your business online and if you understand that doing nothing is rarely what comes out of high-level meetings in successful businesses you will understand that applies online too. A website can so easily work for you as a business owner, if you do the groundwork, keyword research, understand your brand, understand your customer, and what they are saying and display this and focused content on your site and your social media platforms in the right way. You WILL therefore increase brand awareness, you WILL naturally place you and your business in front of the RIGHT customers and your business WILL grow online.

We would love to talk to you about your website and how you can increase your brand awareness and speak to the right clients, come and have a chat!