If you’re like most business owners in the digital age, then you probably measure you’re website’s effectiveness by the number of customers that it delivers to your doorstep.  The more daily foot traffic that mentions seeing you online, the more time you invest on creating a great web-based user experience.  And that’s great IF your website is creating fresh leads on a regular basis.

On the other hand, the #1 reason why business owners neglect their online presence is because they are not receiving an influx of customers from it, and then they illogically assume that it is because people are not looking online for that type of product/service.  We all know that’s inaccurate though since people use their smartphones for everything these days.  Just look around you…people are likely visiting your competitor’s websites while they’re inside your store shopping.

If you’re not sure if you’re one of our local Spartanburg faithful that’s neglecting their website presence, then here are five things you should be doing routinely-

Posting Fresh Content

Every time you post new content to your website, it’s like sending a distress beacon to Google that says, “Hey, look at me…I care about my customers.”  And in turn, the search engines will begin to visit your website more often to ensure that your readers can always access the most recent content from the search engines.  The beautiful thing is that fresh content doesn’t have to be elaborate articles either- it can be new product descriptions or new services/items, video and photographs, or even updates to existing pages.

Changing Your Homepage

Likewise, changing up your homepage even a little bit can have profound effects on your customers.  That’s why all the big businesses switch up their homepage graphics frequently; it keeps the site feeling new and fresh without changing the actual navigation.  So even if it’s just adding some new photos to your slider or adding a few banners, these changes really do matter in the grand scheme of things.

Social Media Updates

Whenever a consumer visits you on social media, the very first thing they do is look at the last thing posted by your company.  And if the date is several months old, then that tells them that you’re not very interested in communicating with them.  The crazy part is that you can post anything on social media to keep those engagement levels high- it can be anything from store branding to photographs to news content and local information.

Using Outdated Contact Forms

If a customer has to look at your website for more than three seconds to find your email address, phone number, store location or hours of operation, then you are seriously neglecting your website.  In fact, this is the number one reason why consumers leave a website shortly after visiting it for the first time; they simply do not have the patience to hunt down information that you should display on every page.  So if you’re guilty of this, fix it immediately.

Offering Very Little Core Content

Likewise, there is absolutely no excuse for not having great descriptions of what your business does, what products/services are available and why consumers should trust in you.  This is the core of any great website, yet all of us come across horrible domains every single day that can’t answer even basic questions.  Since this type of content also highly influences how well your website ranks, it is absolutely critical for your long term success.