Why it's important to keep your blog updated!
We often design and build websites for clients and what is accepted as being essential these days is the ability to update a site with regular news stories and/or a blog.
However, if there is no one available to keep the blog updated, it is often better not to have one at all in order to avoid disappointing visitors that do land on this page. There’s nothing worse than visiting a website and seeing a blog which was last updated in September 17 or earlier!
Our recommendation is that if you are going to have a blog then it should be taken care of properly and that means regularly adding new content. The best way of doing this is to commission a PR company, like Dragonfly PR, to write regular blogs and news stories for your website, which will help improve your Google ranking and generate more traffic to your site.
I met with a new client recently and checked their website out before the meeting. The last time a story had been added was October 2016. The story was about how a former political figure, who has now lost office, visited one of their factories. They were surprised when I pointed out that they needed to keep their news pages more regularly updated, as I explained that news and blog pages are amongst the most visited areas of a website.
Take the Dragonfly PR website, for example, we carefully monitor our Google Analytics every month and our blog (it is updated every week!), is the second highest page (over 30%) for visitor traffic arriving on the site – the first, as you would expect, is the home page. Another way to look at this is that if we didn’t have a blog that was regularly updated we could be missing out a third of the traffic that we currently achieve!
Having old news on your website certainly does create the wrong impression of a business. It makes a business look static, stuck in the past and gives the perception that it would be unresponsive to customers. I don’t know about you but if I am looking to buy a product or service and I find out of date news on a website, I am more likely to visit another site which has more relevant, up to date information. Manufacturers and construction companies could be losing valuable business opportunities by not appearing to be switched on to updating their websites.
Another question we are often asked is how often should we update our blog/news page?
The answer is ‘as often as you can’. We would recommend that, as a rule of thumb, the blog/news page is updated at least once a month, but more frequently, ideally. We work with a number of manufacturing, food and construction clients where we write and upload a couple of blogs and 2-3 news articles to their websites every month.
The problem is that many manufacturers and b2b companies simply do not have the time or resources to dedicate to writing this content. This is where we come in. The Dragonfly PR team has extensive experience in writing blogs and news stories for clients in many b2b sectors, including food manufacture, manufacturing and construction. If you would like a free, no-obligation quotation for providing PR or blog writing services, please drop us a line on hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 01709 300130.