Creating a website and setting it live is a big reason to celebrate, but guess what? Just having a website online doesn’t magically do a lot of good yet for your business. There are some important things to look at, for example:
- keeping site fresh and up to date with news, sales offers, articles, etc, etc
- telling the world about all that cool stuff you have – otherwise nobody will know
- doing some housekeeping: checking for software updates, webmaster tools, analytics
You have to accept, that website is not GIC which is bought and you don’t think about it for next 3 years. Think about website as a sales guy you are hiring – you pay that guy salary, spend time teaching them what to do and they bring you business, at least it should work this way.
Good news is, you don’t have to do all upkeep yourself, especially if you not sure what you are doing. There are simple solutions – find the right people to do work for you. But please, don’t just hire a student and ask to do “website stuff”. It may work sometimes, but what are the chances they will know for what to do, how to do that, and most important, how to do it well? You probably better getting a few freelancers to work on different areas of the website such as
- writing articles
- keeping an eye on technical stuff (upgrades, etc)
- marketing and SEO
- programming new features when you need them
You can set your own pace with the maintenance tasks, sample schedule could be
Daily
- keep in touch with your followers in social media
- check Google alerts – free service from Google sending you new pages they discovered which match your keywords… You have to look after your business name mentions and maybe on industry specific keywords
Weekly
- post something new… better do it twice a week!
- get a few quality incoming links to your site
Monthly
- check webmaster tools for any problems and trends
- check analytics, again, look for trends and problems
- after completing those 2 tasks ask yourself if you like what you see, if there is something which need to be changed
- check your Google/Bing rankings
Annual
- look at the big picture: does your marketing strategy work? Do you attract right crowd? Do you get quality leads? Chat with someone who is not directly involved in your business or website maintenance and see if they bring some good ideas or issues to the table
As required
Make sure someone is actually keeping an eye on the software releases (WordPress just released version 3.1.2, do you know that?), browser versions, social media trends, mobile news, etc, etc and react to any changes which may affect your site. But don’t panic – new version of iPhone doesn’t mean you have to rebuild the whole site 🙂 So, some items to watch:
- browser versions, especially major releases, especially Internet Explorer
- security updates on the software you are using
- whatever new ideas Google may have announced regarding search results, make sure your site is ready for that
Of course all those lists are just a sample to start you thinking – make sure you worked on your own personalized watch list and to-do list and don’t forget to give some attention to your website.