Can you update your website yourself? by updating I don't mean big design changes or anything, just the content, latest news, announcements or the odd blog post.
If you can't, or you don't - you need to and you should!
The fact is that search engines love fresh, valuable content on websites. Each time you add or change content to your site, the major search engine 'spiders' that index your website take the time to visit you again to see what is new.
There are certain things you can do when writing your website content to again increase your chances of ranking highly. I'm not an SEO Expert as such but when writing the content for sites I work on, I use a couple of techniques to try and be as SEO friendly as possible.
Firstly, I think about things from a customer point of view - put myself in their shoes so to speak. What would I type in to Google if I was looking for this particular sort of business? I then write down the top 5 or 10 "keywords" that I think people are using to look for the sort of product, service or information I am writing about. Then when writing the copy for the site, I try and use those keywords as often as possible without being too repetetive and ruining the point of the message - it can take a while to get the hang of but seems to be beneficial in increasing the chance of appearing near the top of the results when people type in those keywords.
Secondly, I focus on quality and usefulness. If a website has high quality, focused and useful content on it, people will link to it. Links are like "votes" - search engines treat them as an acknowledgement to the usefulness of your site. Please don't be fooled into thinking linking to anybody and everybody will do you any good though! Not all links are treated equally. Links from high quality sources are given more weight than random links that have no relevence to your business.
In summary, the more useful, up to date content you can add to your site, the higher the chance that you'll rank highly in search results - meaning more customers and more profits. For further information regarding how search engine optimisation works -take a look at this article
Ok so we've thought about how to write but what do you write? This can be the hard bit!
Below are three strategies to help you figure out what to write about...
- Think about what has been happening in the last month in your business or business sector. Did you reach any milestones in terms of customers, profits or product releases? Has there been any new legislation put in place that may affect or be of interest to your customers? Write about them! Customers love to read positive things about your business and appreciate being informed of new information that might affect them in someway.
- Are there any upcoming events that visitors to your site may be interested to hear about? For example, I worked on a recruitment website and got lots of visits each time i let customers know about any changes to employment law that could impact them either in a positive or negative way. Keeping your customers up to date with information about you and your business sector makes you a reputable source for information and in turn increases the likely hood of peope choosing you and your business over the many other similar ones out there.
- Did something interesting happen to you that taught you a positive lesson you could share? It could be an experience you went through personally or professionaly that led you to make a decision to change or improve the way you and your business work. Share these stories with your customers on a blog post! They're fun, interesting and they say a lot about the things you and your business value.
There's always something to write, just remember the golden rules of content and you'll be fine:
- Is the content relevant to your customers or your business?
- Does the content add value to your customers?
Once upon a time, making changes or updating your website involved paying web designers (like us!) to do this for you - with Psy-Web's Online Business Console, you don't need to worry about that. We supply you will all the tools and training required to stop paying us to update things for you and instead allowing you to update what you like, when you like without involving any third parties - unless you would actually prefer us to do it for you that is!
Garnering awareness and acquiring customers is one of the great challenges of building a business. It is so important that there is an entire business discipline dedicated to this - known as marketing! 
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