3 Ways to Maintain Your Website

By Stephanie Carrillo, Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

Often, I see B2B companies with small marketing teams neglecting their web site. As marketers, we get busy, we tend to align our priorities to our sales goals, but website maintenance and upkeep gets left out. But chances are, it is causing you to lose sales.

According to Quora users and other experts, a company should be spending anywhere from 2-5 hours a week maintaining their website.

Here are three website maintenance ideas to focus on each month.

Website Content

Content management includes everything from adding new content to removing or updating old content.

Does your resource center or blog have content from 4-5 years ago?  Chances are, it is no longer relevant and should be updated.  One trick to maintaining content, use your analytics program to pull a list of landing pages with the least amount of traffic.  From that list, determine if the content on those specific pages is currently relevant. If no longer relevant, then it is time to retire the page and redirect the traffic.

Look at your bounce rates.  Use your analytics program to track the performance of your most crucial web pages. Out of those pages, identify the pages with the highest bounce rates and focus your efforts to improve the content.  Bounce rate can indicate many things, not driving relevant traffic or the content is not providing the answers to the questions that brought them there in the first place.

Lastly, do not forget SEO. SEO plays a huge role in marketing, so ensuring your website is optimized for SEO is a substantial component to maintaining content on your website.

Website Security

Outside of content, a website should be secure.  Regardless of the type of website you have or what it is vulnerable to hacker attacks, phishing, and spambots, it needs to be secured.  Performing regular scheduled maintenance to ensure your website security is up to date is essential. A vendor can help, and the cost is not very substantial.

If you’re using WordPress to manage your website, a simple security plugin is used to satisfy this requirement, but someone will need to make sure the plugin is updated on an ongoing basis.

Part of security for your website is user privacy. Every company must follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR regulates each of these items; privacy policies, SSL certificate, website forms, Opt-In and Opt-out ability, cookie permissions, IP tracking, disclosure of social media advertising and re-marketing efforts, and data breaches.

For all items, someone must be responsible for managing and updating to maintain compliance.

Web Page Optimization

All website strategies should include a plan for making website optimizations. A B2B website should be optimized to do the following:

1. Drive the conversion of web visitors into qualified leads
2. Accelerate new qualified lead creation and conversion
3. Drive improvements to overall lead engagement and conversion

With that in mind, you should look at the path customers take on your website. Where are they entering your website? If they visit a second page, do you know where they are going? Is it where you want them to go? What pages are they exiting from? How does your organic traffic behavior differ from direct traffic?  Answering all of these are questions is important to find the pages on your site you need to improve.

As an example, if users are jumping around from page to page but not taking the path you wanted them to go, start reviewing these pages for a way to optimize them.  Maybe your website pages were not designed in a way to show them a path or get them to take action. Here some things to think about.

Each page of your site should have a clear CTA (call to action). The homepage should include some actionable messaging, along with an immediate way to engage with your company. The Home page is a great place to add a welcome pop-up encouraging people to sign up to receive emails or product updates.

Secondary pages like your product or service pages should always include links to more resources.  Those resources can be gated content like guides or datasheets so customers can learn more. Each page should include a CTA to either a “Contact Us” form, phone number, or Chat to help with engagement.

If you want a customer to take a specific step, the content and linking must always support it; otherwise, you leave it up to your visitors to navigate their way.

Optimization can come in small packages; it doesn’t have to be a page redesign.

Final Takeaway

If you leave with only one takeaway from this article, it should be allocating resources of who can dedicate 2-5 hours a week to maintain your website. Your website is your first impression, and you could be losing sales opportunities if it’s not supported. Doing weekly website maintenance keeps your website relevant, improves performance, keeps it in compliance, and will save you money in the end.