How long would your car last without an oil change?
Like everything else, your website needs regular maintenance to stay reliable, viable, and effective.
Just like everything else, your website needs constant care and attention to continue to be a valuable tool to your business. Here is why:
- New content encourages clients and business resources to keep coming back to your website for more interesting information.
- Keep your clients and business resources informed about new services that you offer - you may be loosing clients to the competition because they don't know you offer a service!
- Keep the search engines interested in your website for higher search results. Search engines are attracted to fresh content like moths to a light bulb.
- Growth - as your business grows so should your website. You should always be considering how you can make it a more effective tool.
- Don't loose that competitive edge. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing to make sure you are still "in the game".
Your website is only as good as your management plan
As business owners we are all busy running our businesses. The management of your website is something that ends up being last on everyone's to-do list.
Therefore, every business should be on a proactive website management plan that helps them keep their website running smoothly and working to support the business in customer care, new sales, marketing, customer resources and more. The reality is if a business doesn't have a management plan budgeted out then they run the risk of losing the value of their website. Budgets for management plans range in cost depending on what the business needs are, but most businesses should count on spending between $200.00 and $300.00 a quarter.
What is in a management plan?
Again, management plans should be geared toward a given business's unique goals. Some of the things that a management plan can include are:
- Quarterly phone reviews to review the entire website, website traffic, and marketing efforts surrounding the website.
- Scheduling out updates. Identifying what updates need to happen each quarter and pre-scheduling them so they get done on time.
- Email marketing campaign monitoring. Making sure that the upcoming quarter's marketing emails are planned out and ready to go.
- General updates - making sure that all the text on the website is up-to-date at ALL times.
- SEO management. Review of basic SEO efforts and monitoring of website analytics.
And the list goes on...
At SonicSpider, we are giving our Maintenance Plans a face lift for 2008 and are now calling them Management Plans. We are making them more proactive so that we are more actively managing our clients' websites and giving constant support.
Download a copy of our Management Plan Service Sheet.