Did you look on the bottom? What about the label? No expiration date anywhere?

You can’t find the expiration date on your web content because it’s not there. However, there are a few ways to look at web content and decide on when it should be updated. But that’s probably not what you want to hear. You want to hear a concrete answer on web content expiry. I get that.

So before I get into the long “it depends” conversation, let me give you the short answer. Small businesses should revise their web content at least once a year.

That’s just the minimum effort. Now for the long answer.

Update Your Site Regularly and Keep the Search Engines Happy

A stale site could lose its search engine ranking.  It’s for this reason that blogs prove helpful for keeping a website in a search engine’s favor. If you don’t have the resources to blog, then make it a priority to add new content to your site every three to four months.

Do You Cringe When You Read Your Web Content?

Let’s say you wrote the content for your business a couple of months before you took the first client. Now that you have a few months under your belt it’s likely your business has morphed into something different than you originally planned. Take time every two months to review a page of content. Does it represent your business correctly?

Review Your Bounce Rate

In a recent blog post, I talked about how Google Analytics can help improve your web content and explained how a poor “bounce rate” (how quickly a visitor leaves your site) indicates a need to revise your web content. If your visitors don’t stay on your site long enough to learn what you do, then chances are your website content bores them. Hence, you need to revise those pages right away.

The Phone Doesn’t Ring

If your website does not motivate potential customers to call you, then rewrite your web content. Websites do function as online business cards, but they should also function as sales tools. If the phone isn’t ringing, continue to revise your web content until it does.

Stay Current

Up-to-date copyright dates on the bottom of each web page, links to recent media mentions, and case studies written in the past year each prove to your visitors that your business is an active one. Staying current helps to build trust with the consumer.

Tell me. Is your website content expired?

Sara Lancaster

About Sara Lancaster

Sara is The Condiment Marketing Co.’s founder and creative director. She oversees client relationships, strategic marketing plans, as well as a bit of copywriting and social media management.