No? Well it should be. An effective website should be updated regularly – at least weekly in an ideal world.

Most businesses invest a lot of time and energy in the initial creation of their website – whether it’s a shop window or active e-commerce site. However what they fail to do is refresh it on a regular basis. It’s important for a few reasons but mainly:

• To maintain interest and constant vitality to your website so it doesn’t become stale to repeat visitors. You can tell in an instant if a website that hasn’t been updated for a while
• To help Google (and the others) find you. The search engine ‘spiders’ love new content and your rankings will thank you for it.

Here are 5 top tips for updating your website:

• At the very least put your Twitter feed on your home page. If you seriously don’t have time to update your website content, at least your Tweets will show some activity. It won’t help your SEO (being found on search engines) but it is one way of brushing away the cobwebs on a daily basis. Note, however, that it isn’t very ‘current’ to have your Twitter feed on display and it will only have any effect at all if you Tweet regularly!
• Review your website words on a regular basis. Updating your homepage is a useful way of improving your SEO and interest levels. Take different sections of your site in turn and consider ways to attract interest. New images, interesting quotes and new information can all be easily incorporated.
• Consider incorporating a regularly changing section: ‘Tax Tip of the Week’ for example – this is a quick and easy way to update your website with changing content as well as showing your credibility.
• Include a page for news, blogs and downloads – this is where you and your team can be creative, showcasing individual skills and specialisms through informal, easy to read short articles. See our previous blog on the importance of blogging if you’re not convinced. We know of businesses who rely on the power of blogging to get them high enough business via Google searches to never have to do any advertising at all.
• Do your housekeeping – remove old news, take down events that have passed, trash old newsletters and keep an eye on dates and times you have referred to anywhere on the site.

There’s many more ideas of course – we’ll include more in future blogs. And remember that it is well worth investing in having someone in charge of your online presence – we can help if you need to know more.

Is blogging another one of those 5 minute wonders that marketeers get excited about for little return? We think not. Blogging is beneficial for all businesses, including accountants, for a few reasons. The 2 main, no-nonsense ones that we think will convince you are that:

a) a well-written blog will position you as a credible, informed expert

b) blogs help you get found on search engines.

There are other reasons but how many do you need? An insightful opinion piece that is just 3-4 paragraphs long (can be shorter or longer, depends on your material) and is highly searchable by Google. Google looks for new content continually and a blog is an ideal way to provide it.

Blogging simply requires a platform to do it on and some commitment.

No hard sell but we can do all this for you – just ask us.

And we don’t mean how much does it sell. We’re talking about the UX (excuse the annoying acronym – user experience). What does your online presence say about you? How well are you projecting your organisation’s mission, vision and values? Are you fairly or unfairly represented? Do you even know?

Part of our remit is to measure a firm’s online presence – everything from the obvious ‘shop window’ of its website through to the whole experience a visitor goes on if they encounter your business via Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and blog sites. Your entire online ‘performance’ (taa daaah) forms such an integral, vital part of your brand, it’s something we take seriously and look at from every angle.

“Businesses are coming to understand that what goes on the web stays on the web” (Source: Steve Parrish, Forbes) – as in, it NEVER goes away. If you’re unsure about what you are communicating and how you are being perceived, we can help. If you’re not communicating anything, we can help with that too.