If you’re going to have a website, then it’s important that you maintain it and keep it updated. If you don’t, then it’s not going to provide a lot of value to your business. On the other hand, if you put the effort in to maintain and market your website it can be a precious asset that drives revenue each month.
Many small businesses owners don’t have an in-depth knowledge of digital marketing, and that’s why in this article we’ll show you exactly what you should be doing each week to your website.
Creating Content
Arguably the most important thing that any local business can do as part of their digital marketing strategy is to post new content at least once per week.
Studies have shown that companies that blog or write content get significantly more traffic. This is because this content can be promoted on social media, industry websites and will also rank for keywords in Google and other search engines.
You should be producing as much quality content as possible, but at the very minimum, you should be releasing a nice article once per week.
Check for New Backlinks
As well as creating new content it’s a good idea to keep track of the links that your website is earning. This isn’t just to pat yourself on the back at the end of the week; it’s to keep an eye out for any low-quality links.
If you find that you’re receiving spammy looking links that the best thing to do is to disavow them in Google Search Console. This tells Google that you didn’t create the link and that you don’t approve of it.
This helps to prevent penalties against your site from links that you didn’t even create or naturally want.
Download a Backup
If the worst does happen and your site is hacked, or the servers that it is stored on explodes, you want to have a backup of all of your hard work. You might be surprised to hear that an insane amount of businesses fail ever to create backups of their website.
Ideally, you should be subscribed to an automatic backup program that will download your site once per day, but downloading it once per week manually is fine for most businesses.
Once you’ve downloaded it, we would recommend storing it on an external hard drive if possible; this is another safety precaution that makes it less likely to end up corrupted or lost.
Check Last Weeks Analytics
If you’re going to install Google Analytics, then you might as well take a few minutes each week to look at the data that it’s recording.
Analytics is perfect for getting a breakdown of your traffic sources and seeing how users are interacting with your pages. It can also show you any problems with your website because you’ll see a sudden drop in traffic and user interaction.
Build Backlinks
Hopefully, you have a list of keywords that you’re trying to rank for and are in the process of creating quality content to target them. Unfortunately, great content often isn’t enough, and you’ll need to build backlinks to help you rank.
The key to building sustainable backlinks that won’t cause penalties is to market your content ethically. Share your content with others in your industry but don’t try and acquire links from a cooking website if you’re a building company.
Quality content marketing can result in not only a truckload of powerful links but also traffic to your site which may convert into paying customers.
Perform a Site Scan
Just as you should be taking a weekly backup, you should also be scanning your website and server for any malware or virus’. These are more common than you might expect and many hackers will specifically target small businesses because they are less tech savvy.
Look for Errors
If your website is using any plugins or requesting data through an API, then you’ll likely face an error at some point. Even if you don’t change anything on your end, you might find that the plugin breaks or the API start throwing up error codes.
The easiest way to check for this is to spend a few seconds each week clicking through your most popular pages and looking for problems. Simple!
Update Your Social Media Accounts
Finally, make sure that you’re updating your social media accounts with your newest content and connecting with your customers. Ideally, you should be doing this every single day, but once per week is the bare minimum.
These updates can help to drive new customers, retain your current customers and generate social shares or backlinks to your content.
Conclusion
It’s essential that you maintain your website. Your site represents your brand, and if your website looks outdated or it’s broken, it’s going to discourage potential customers from purchasing from you.