SMALL BUSINESS SUCCESS: 5 Crucial Reasons to Keep Your Website Updated

Security should be one of your top concerns. If you're not taking your website's security seriously, it puts you at risk for cyber attacks. 

Cyber attacks cost the economy billions each year. Unfortunately, small businesses are often the targets of cybercrime because they tend to lack the security infrastructure that larger companies have. Therefore, they make easier targets. 

If you're like many small business owners, you don't know where to start when it comes to security and IT. You might not have the budget for an in-house team.

There are still steps you can take to protect your website and your business. 

One of the ways that hackers get into a website is through automated tools, such as vulnerabilities in plug-ins. Regularly updating your website and making sure you keep all plug-ins updated is key to staying safe.

Building on the last point, keeping a website updated helps to build customer trust. For one, customers will feel more comfortable trusting you with their personal information and credit card numbers if they know your website is secure.

In 2020 alone, there were 1,387,615 reports of identity theft. Chances are high that website visitors know someone who was a victim of identity theft or has had their information stolen themselves. 

Those customers will think twice about using an outdated website, as security remains one of their top concerns as well. 

Additionally, customers are more likely to trust a professional-looking website. It shows that you're a legitimate business and that you take your brand appearance seriously.

There is a reason brands frequently change their logos, brand colors, and the appearance of their stores. Outdated stores feel out of touch, dirty, and unwelcoming. 

Imagine walking into a restaurant with barstools covered in duct tape, dust on the ceiling fan, and stains ground into the dirty carpet. 

While this might not bother some people, it certainly alarms most customers. Those customers would likely have questions about the cleanliness of the place, especially back in the kitchen. 

How does this relate to a website? 

Your website needs to be "cleaned" and refreshed from time to time as well. This might mean doing a website audit, looking for broken links and pictures, removing duplicate content, updating old articles, or changing the design entirely. 

A professional, updated website reflects well on your small business. Customers and clients are more likely to trust you as well.

A big part of small business advertising is learning how to bring more traffic to the website and convert those visitors into leads. No matter your industry, this is one of the keys to success. 

Websites that are never updated can struggle to rank, not because they're old but because they haven't been updated in a while. As your business changes, your website needs to change with it. This may mean choosing new keywords to rank for, changing the logo, adding new content, etc. 

One of the biggest benefits of creating new content is that it brings more traffic to the website. 

However, more traffic doesn't necessarily mean more sales. Unfortunately, 80% of new leads don't translate into sales. 

So, what can you do to start advertising your business in a way that attracts quality leads and more conversions? 

Lead generation is the start of the journey. You can generate more leads when you have a professional, user-friendly website. Customers and clients will feel more comfortable taking actions such as signing up for newsletters, filling out a contact form, or buying a product. 

Once you have quality leads, you need to nurture them. However, you can't reach this point if you don't regularly update your website.

Visitors that see an old, broken website are more likely to hit the back button than stick around. This is bad for several reasons; it affects your bounce rate and your dwell time. Thankfully, updating your website and your SEO can help. 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of web visitors that land on a page without taking an action, such as clicking a link or buying a product. Bounce rate may be a Google ranking factor. Depending on the style of your website, a high bounce rate can negatively affect your business. 

A high bounce rate means that those visitors aren't sticking around long enough to become leads or customers. 

Dwell time is the length of time someone spends on a webpage after clicking on a link in a search engine results page and until they click back to the SERP results. During this time, a visitor evaluates the website, decides if they want to stick around, or decides to click back. 

This metric is so important because it demonstrates whether visitors find what they need on a page or not. 

Updating your website, making it easier to navigate, adding more content, and following SEO best practices, are all ways to improve these metrics. You can keep visitors around longer, improve dwell time, and encourage them to convert.