The Benefits Of Website Maintenance

Improve The Security Of Your Website

With how quickly things are changing in the world - especially the internet - today, keeping your business and customers protected is incredibly important. Security applications, software, and services are constantly updating, and if your website uses outdated software and plugins, you're leaving yourself wide open to attack. Spammers and hackers are continually looking for websites that are left vulnerable, and regularly updating and maintaining your website is one of the best ways to protect yourself and your visitors. While investing in a maintenance package won't make you immune to attacks, you can recover much more quickly with a web developer continually updating and maintaining your website frequently.

Website Maintenance Is Important For SEO

While monthly website maintenance is not the same as an SEO campaign, because of the positive signals regular maintenance sends to search engines, you'll be much more likely to get more traffic than any of your competitors not updating their websites. Making frequent and consistent changes to your site - no matter how small - shows search engines that the content owner cares. It shows Google two things:

1. You care about your website/content and the overall perception of your online presence
2. You care about the experience your users have on your website. 

Especially if you're making regular updates to information customers will find valuable, such as sales, promotions, sales copy, etc. These updates make it much more likely that your pages will show up higher and more quickly in search engines than your competitors. In Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide, they even state this themselves. However, if rankings are your primary concern, hiring an SEO expert to conduct a search engine optimization strategy for your website might make more sense.

Consistently Creating Fresh Content Keeps Customers Updated

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We've already said it a few times throughout this article, but another benefit of regular maintenance is ensuring your customers have reliable, updated information. This month you're offering a particular discount, or in a few months, you want to run a promotion. You may even have a brand new service or technology you want to offer or feature.

Instead of waiting to tell the customer in person, you can have your website inform them instead. Here are a few ways you can keep your customers updated with monthly website maintenance.

1. Keep them informed of sales or promotions
2. Ensure the website displays any sudden changes to your menu, contact information, etc.
3. Use the website to display new technologies/products/services
4. Flesh out your FAQ section - as you get asked new questions, add that information to the website
5. Add guides or content to the website that helps your customers through your pipeline easier

Site Maintenance Is Vital To Maximizing Customer Acquisition

Not only is regular website maintenance important for SEO and gaining traction in search engines in general, but it's also important for taking opportunities to get in front of your customers. Consistent content creation allows you to make articles that help your potential clients at each stage of the buying process. The way this helps your acquisition process comes in the form of trust. 

For example, let's say your client had a question early in the buying stage. Well, because of the content on your website, they had their question answered, and more importantly, your business helped them. They'll remember that going forward. Your website and, more importantly, your business was the authority that helped educate them. However, it continues to compound because as they further down the sales funnel and advance in the buying process, they'll have other questions. 

If you invest in a quality website maintenance plan or an SEO campaign, you'll have that content to help them at each stage. Eventually, when they're ready to pull the trigger, they'll remember your website. Remembering the information you gave them on your website, they'll see your business as the one that helped arm them with the knowledge they needed. This is one of the best ways monthly website maintenance can help your business.

Gain Additional Protection With Regular Website Backups

In addition to keeping yourself and others safer from hackers and spammers, website maintenance ensures that your development team can regularly back up your site. Regular backups provide that if anything ever goes wrong, you'll always have backups you can revert your website to, adding a layer of protection for you and your customers. Not only that, but backups help make it easier on your web development costs as well.

For instance, if a few months back, your website maintenance team created various pieces of content that revolved around sales your business planned to have. Well, when you decide to remove those sales, they'll be able to revert those pages back to their original state - before the promotions were being advertised. This ensures that your web development team will spend less time on your project, and will therefore be able to keep your costs low.

Conclusion

The main benefits of website maintenance come into play in quality. As a business owner, ensuring your clients have the most updated, quality information regarding your business, current sales/promotions, etc., is vital to your online success. In addition to helping your customers stay updated, it's also one of the main positive signals Google wants to see from websites. Website maintenance also helps ensure that your content ranks higher. Websites that never update their pages and never create new content might wind up on the first page for a little bit, but Google will quickly remove them in favor of more consistent competition. So with all of that being said, if you have any more questions regarding how monthly website maintenance can help your website, or even if you want to get started with your own maintenance package, you can book a call with us to learn more.