How often should you update your website copy?

You built your website, launched it, and now it’s out there. But it’s not exactly performing well. Your competition is crushing it, and you wonder what’s wrong.

Good website design is one thing, but Google does not judge the design. You need good quality content that sells your services. And this is the part where most businesses fail - lack of customer-focused content.

The days of your website being a simple online business card are over. A website can become an incredibly valuable business asset that delivers sales. The sooner you take it seriously, the better.

Like any asset, your website needs investment to return a profit.

Imagine how your website looks to your customers on their mobiles, tablets or desktops. Can they find relevant information quickly and see how your solution is an incredibly valuable offer? Or is your website just like every other, bland without any real value to the reader and last updated in 2002?

How do you know if you need to change your content?

I’m sure you have included all of your services and thoroughly described your company history. Your ethos, how many coffee cups you drink, how many dogs are in the office, and what else you believe in. Sorry to break it to you, but customers don’t care! They care about one thing - what’s in it for them.

Your content should always be up to date, accurate and relevant to your readers. If you run a blog, consistency in releasing new articles also plays a big part.

Some most common indicators of a failing website are:

• Bounce rate and time on site are some of the leading indicators that your website text is not working. Are people actually reading your text?
• Inaccurate and out of date content. Is the text accurate? Or does your website still have a service you did back in 2005 and no longer offer? Is your content out of date?
• No business leads are coming from the website. Your website is a business asset that should deliver leads, value and credibility.
• Your competition is dominating local searches and gets most significant market share thanks to the website alone.

My website text sucks; what now?

Not to worry, you don’t need to start an expensive website redesign. You just need Sirius Copywriters to look at your website content and develop a content strategy plan.

Define your value:

Let’s do a little exercise. Using what we learned from Donald Miller StoryBrand, you need to create a “one-liner”. I know it sounds cheesy but let’s try it anyway. A good one-liner comprises three parts - the problem, the solution and the result.

Imagine you have a computer repair business: “Is your laptop unbearably slow? You should not have to tolerate it, and with our help, we’ll upgrade your laptop in just 24 hours so that you can get back to work”.

That’s how you start highlighting your value better than your competition, and customers will see that you care. Thus, adding to your credibility as a guide that can help them. You are not the hero of this story; your customer is. You are the guide that helps them!

Researching what matters the most to your customers is a crucial starting point. You have to understand your customers and the value your service brings to their lives. It does not matter which product you sell or the service you offer. There is a reason customers buy it. You need to understand the value your company creates.

Define content type:

First, let’s see different kinds of content for your website. And there are many different types, very much depending on your company.

• Main web pages
• Service pages
• Landing pages
• Customer stories
• Area pages
• Case studies

And with a bit of care, you can reuse tons of the website content for social media too. Just create small snippets of a single point on one topic and compliment images where applicable.

While analysing text for Custom PC Genie, we came up with customer stories. A unique piece of content that showcases the fantastic gaming computers built by the company and the opportunity for the owners to share the page.

How about a blog?

No, you don’t need a blog. Just look at what we did for The Computer Genie and Custom PC Genie. Carefully crafted content structure throughout your website will be enough. Remember, a website with landing pages and area pages will support your other marketing efforts like social media.

If you can offer valuable information that your readers find interesting enough to share, you have a good case for a blog. But keeping up with the weekly release schedule can be demanding. It’s where most businesses stop. You will need to plan the content and invest in either the Sirius Copywriting team to build the content for you or dedicate your team resources.

Updating a company blog can be demanding but very rewarding and can become the sole source of your business leads. Just look at companies like Digital Ocean. They built an entire library of invaluable tutorials for developers - their primary target audience.

So how often do you need to change content?

The short answer is as often as you need to. Refreshing content on landing pages every year (or more often if you can manage it) is probably a good idea. Google likes pages where content is updated for purposes of accuracy.

Content should be your friend, not an enemy.

Using website SEO optimised content for marketing is the key to your company’s success.

As long as a piece of content is engaging readers and delivers leads, that’s good content. You will need to measure this, of course. Which pages are working and which are not, and keep optimising those that aren’t working.

We like to advise clients on refreshing the content at least once a year. It seems to be the best value and performance spot for delivering tangible and measurable results.