Is Your Small Business Website Incomplete? Don't Worry, It's Okay Because No Site Is Ever Finished
There's a persistent myth a site has to be "complete" to be published. The truth is, no site is ever truly finished…
It's a common refrain among our new clients...their website isn't complete. That's why they're reaching out to us--they need content, a lot of content. The reasoning is largely the same from business to business; their pages are simply too sparse and there just has to be more information so visitors (and search engines) can gain an understanding of the products and services offered.
Those notions are quite correct. Both people and search engines need details to digest and to decide the worth of the site. However, this is where people and search engines differ. People can understand and reason. Meanwhile, search engines are software and as such, can only process data it's programmed to collect.
Interestingly, people begin to devolve into a machine, trying to "think" like a bundle of software run on miles of hardware. Here's a reality that seems all too elusive: a website is never complete.
Incomplete Website Versus Gaining Value
Think about it for a moment - a website is never really complete. There's always something new being added because every industry experiences changes. New products become available; services improve with technology, and there's an ever-evolving perspective among industry insiders and their consumers.
"Content is king. You'll hear that phrase over and over again when it comes to SEO success. Indeed that’s why the Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors begins with the content 'elements,' with the very first element being about content quality," --Search Engine Land
Here's another way of putting it--if a website is complete, it’s already begun its descent into obscurity. Search engines demand new content for relevancy. That's the core function of blogging--adding new value to a site. Should a website become stagnant, it starts losing value to search engines. After all, there are plenty of competitors adding new information.
Simply put no matter how great, original, and useful a site is, once it is no longer actively updated, there's no reason for search engines to crawl it again. The entire purpose of a sitemap is to alert search engines there's new content on a site - so, search engines don't return until that time.
Blogging for Business
Search engines love blogs, period. The reason is that most website pages are static. There's very little new added and only periodically. (And, sometimes, not for many months or even a few years.) Blogs, on the other hand, are regularly updated with fresh content. That new content is included in the site's sitemap, which in turn, pings the search engines. Index robots respond and crawl the new information. Depending on how well the content is optimized, and how valuable it is, it gets assigned a rank for organic query results.
Of course, the takeaway is a site must publish new articles as regularly and consistently as possible. That's like anything else in business. After all, retailers don't sell out their entire inventory and not replace it. So, it's actually beneficial to have an "incomplete" website that’s consistently adding value - which attracts consumer attention, boosts SEO, and delivers more sales.
