By Laura Cornett, CMA

Laura Cornett

Remember the last time you came across a website that gave you the impression the information was old and out dated? You probably bailed out and quickly moved on to the next site, unfulfilled. In the online world, your website is the first thing potential customers are going to see. It will ultimately affect their trust in your company and your services. To avoid creating a lack of trust in visitors, a maintenance program should be created to continue to keep your website up to date. This program is an on-going, proactive plan that keeps your website’s content current and relevant. And, it helps build trust with your consumers; you must keep your website FRESH!

Keeping it FRESH!

New and updated content is crucial to keep visitors coming back for more. Every site should routinely feature creative, new and relevant content to build traffic of repeat visitors, ultimately improving their impression of your company. Your website is one of the most important marketing tools when it comes to attracting new clients, and it should not be used simply as a static internet billboard. Search engines favor websites that have lots of frequently updated content, pushing them higher in search results, helping customers discover your site.

A good way to keep your site fresh is by adding information about events, new products and offering case studies or testimonials. You can update once a week or twice a month depending on how much new content you can produce. Other ways to frequently update content:

• Post your YouTube videos and embed them in your website pages
• Build a blog using WordPress and integrate it into your website
• Upload your press releases and/or other relevant news

Maintaining your website maintains customers’ trust
Keep in mind that it is important to provide relevant information to customers in order to build their trust. To make sure that the information is relevant, you should have a very good understanding of your customers’ needs. If you ignore their needs, this can be a merciless blunder and severely affect your credibility.

A great way to build credibility and find out more about what’s important to your customers is to let them vouch for you. Have an area on the website where users can generate their own content. Provide them the opportunity to place comments on your articles, submit testimonials or a review, or upload photos of your product in use.

Besides letting your potential customers see testimonial s from other users, this also has an added marketing benefit because search engines like user generated content. They view it as a vote of confidence by viewers rather than just marketing/sales information.

If you are concerned someone may submit something you would not like to see published, don’t worry – there are ways to monitor this content, and your web designer can set it up so you can approve it before it gets posted.

One of the most important things you can do to build consumer trust and confidence is to maintain your website. The more updated, relevant content you offer the more viewer confidence you are going to build with each click of the mouse. Set a calendar reminder and get started today with your website maintenance program.