The current media fascination with contaminated “beef” burgers throws up an interesting parallel for website content managers and copywriters – just how fresh is the text on your website? Does your website contain contaminated copy?
The demand for new website content is insatiable. Blog posts, white papers, articles and general product information pages need to be created on a frequent (even daily) basis to attract customers and search engines alike. But what about the older copywritten content on your site?
Copywritten content contamination is bad. Like horsemeat in burgers bad.
Well established blogs have hundreds of posts which help maintain a narrative trail for your business. The problem is that these blog posts often contain outdated information. Defunct products, old pricing information and outdated research can contaminate your copy, discrediting newer, up-to-date blog entries.
It is tempting to think that outdated information will be ignored by customers, but search engines have a nasty habit of resurrecting old web pages. When a would-be customer stumbles across one of these pages they may decide that your out-of-date information reflects your business as a whole – disinterested in keeping things up to date, or lacking in attention to detail. Worse still, you may end up losing sales when clients contact you about an online price which is no longer relevant.
What is the answer? Unfortunately the only way to prevent contaminated content damaging your brand is to keep on top of it, amending and deleting old web pages to reflect the current situation. Is this time consuming? Absolutely! Can you avoid it? No. But you could make someone responsible for ensuring website copy remains up-to-date relieving the burden on you and your team. And if you already employ a professional website copywriter, they are the logical choice for such a responsibility.
Many amendments can be avoided by careful advance planning of content. If you are launching a new product via the company blog, make it clear that any promotional pricing is time-limited for instance. Or include a link from the blog entry to a dedicated product page on your ecommerce site for customers to find pricing information.
Need help getting your website copy up-to-date and back on-track? Drop us a line and see how Tech Write can assume responsibility for ensuring your website and blog are up-to-the-minute accurate.
