B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine » Does Your Company Stand Still? Neither Should Your Website.

Does Your Company Stand Still? Neither Should Your Website.

May 5th, 2008 Posted by: Matt Roche

Like every organism in nature, your company is constantly evolving: developing new products or services, addressing new markets, changing its image to the world (aka branding). That means that your website – as the company’s “front door” these days – absolutely must evolve to keep pace. Few things are more off-putting to prospects than learning that they just spent a lot of time researching an older version of your product: “Oh no, the latest doc on that is this pdf that we put together awhile back… I’ll email it to you, OK?” You can certainly forgive the prospect for thinking, “Why wasn’t this content on their site?” The more critical question is, will (s)he forgive you?

And beyond just staying current, even content that isn’t rendered obsolete by events needs to be freshened periodically. According to KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa’s Connecting through Content joint study of over 4,000 technology marketers and buyers, more than 79% of technology buyers are on the Web at least once a week seeking relevant new information. What do you suppose they conclude if they keep seeing the “same-old, same-old” on your site?

It’s also important to note that if you neglect your content, over time the search engine spiders will decrease the frequency of their visits. That makes your site less “relevant” in the search engine’s index, which will eventually lead to lower search engine results-page rankings.

It really doesn’t have to be that way; secrets of an always-current site
Organizations whose websites evolve in lockstep with the company tend to have a set of best practices in common:

Discipline – Updating the website needs to be an ingrained habit …sort of like going to church. If it’s put off to be done “when there’s some slack time”, it won’t get done …ever. There needs to be an evangelist or point person; there needs to be visible management commitment; and there must be a “website-update” check-off box in the approval process for every relevant document type from every appropriate department.

Quality – “Good” organizations follow quality/appropriateness guidelines for their website content. They ensure that it’s educational, because that’s what prospects want (see our blog post, “Is Your Website Educating …or Simply Boasting?”). They take care to post material appropriate to all stages of the sales cycle, since they know that prospects return several times during their research phase (we blogged on this topic recently, also). And where possible, they try to tailor content to specific visitor types by job function and industry.

But finding quality content generally isn’t all that difficult. Aside from product updates, white papers and case studies, all of your e-newsletters, press releases, press articles and client testimonials should be published and archived on your website.

Optimize for search – Like the rest of the site, those new pages need to be “SEOd” too. That means ensuring that the content incorporates relevant keywords, and paying attention to those page titles/headlines, page or H1 tags, alt-tags, meta-name keyword and description tags. You might take a look at our recent blog posting on this topic; and for still more SEO tips, check out our white paper “Best Practice Methods for Driving Qualified Web Traffic”.

Too often marketers tend to resort to Marcomm-speak in their product pages, and leave the keywords to the press releases. It’s best to keep in mind that your visitors are scanning for keywords; identifying them is how they know they’re in the right place. Which product page title do you think is “stickier”: “Brand X Lightweight Widgets Increase Uptime by 150%”; or “Brand X – Because We Care”?? Using important keywords in the page title also improves the relevance of the page to the search engines. Your product pages generally have the highest Google Page Rank on your website, so it’s vital to use relevant, keyword-rich content on those pages. Don’t take them out of the press releases… but don’t forgo them in favor of Marcomm-speak on your most visited pages.

Content Management System – Using a CMS considerably smooths the updating process. A good one will enable non-technical staff – whether in Marketing, Finance or HR – to take direct ownership of their department’s Web content with no need for IT assistance …from a web browser anywhere, anytime.

Don’t “set it and forget it”.
With these best practices in place, you’ll easily be able to ensure that your website closely tracks your company’s progress and remains of interest to visitors (both human and robotic); so there should be no more need for apologizing to anyone.

Still having difficulty? There may be no external help for the organizational-discipline part; but your friendly Web marketing professionals can certainly help you address content quality issues, content management and SEO.