Updating Your Website – Give your website a facelift that POPS![VIDEO]

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Do you know how often you should be updating your website to optimise search results, stay current and maintain an excellent customer experience?

Okay, so it’s a bit of a trick question; the answer is different for each of those goals. It can also depend on your industry, the function of your website, and several other aspects of your business. No matter how well you keep on top of your website updates and data refreshing, there is always a time when your site appearance could use a freshen up. 

That’s what we’re doing today.  

This weeks’ video is about how to use the SimplyBook.me system make your booking website “Pop!”, with a facelift for the upcoming season. But we’ll not stop there. There are many tools available to help you with your existing website, but they can also help with your booking website.

Updating Your SimplyBook.me Website

One of the best things about the constant updates and developments on SimplyBook.me is that we’re always coming up with fresh ways to help you achieve the best system you can have. This approach also applies to the many ways that you can change and update the appearance of your booking website.

Custom Theme Builder

We can’t start anywhere but one of our newest releases, which allows you far more freedom to alter the appearance of your booking site than ever before. You can keep all the things that make your brand identifiable, such as logos and colour schemes, but the rest is fluid. You can change much about the content and the appearance of your booking site home page with the Custom Theme Builder, and you can do it to highlight whichever aspect of your business needs the publicity.

As an example, the image below is my standard page. I have a logo in the top left, and an extended banner with a slogan.

However, I fancied a change for the summer. I changed the colour scheme slightly, still blue, but lighter and airier for summer. I also wanted to highlight that I have a new member of staff for a new service. However, I wanted to keep the same dark logo.

Updating your website on SimplyBook.me has never been easier, and with new design alterations, you still don’t need to know how to code.

Instagram Photo sharing or Photo Gallery

Do you have a photo gallery already? Why not make life easier for yourself and let Instagram do the hard work – assuming you use Insta for business. If your Instagram sharing for business is more casual than pristine images you prefer for your website, that’s fine. Keep them separate, but the authentic human face of your business is just as important as your business profile.

Blog

The News custom feature from on the SimplyBook.me platform a basic text editor that will show your news and blog articles. Now, it might not be all flashy, like a custom blog page, but you do have the option to use HTML to improve the appearance.

Blogging is one of the most common ways to keep your website updated and current in the eyes of the search engines. It’s too valuable to avoid.

About Us

“About Us” is probably some variation on your foundation story, business ethos, and some more tidbits like that. If your company is going through some changes, adding to your service provision, or even adding partners or new staff, it’s an excellent idea to keep your page up to date with fresh developments.

Business Description

Your business description is another content block that you can regularly update and highlight on the home page of your booking site. Got something new to say? Blog about it and put a summary in your business description. If you really want to highlight it, give your description pride of place with a full-width content box right under your header.

Offers, Promotions & Gift Cards

As a general “rule of thumb”, you should use ‘lead magnets’ about once every four months. As it happens, this coincides nicely with seasonal changes and offer periods. 

Highlight your discount vouchers, update your banner image to let people know about it. Put your gift card options on the home page.

Ready To Really Make Things POP?

Now, there are so many tools available that will make your business profiles shine. Sometimes, it’s just not enough to use ordinary images from your phone camera, or stock images from free repositories. 

Canva – Images & Designs

Want to pep up your service images, hero banner or even your social media posts? While there are other contenders on the market, Canva is still the best option available. While there is a paid professional subscription, even with a free account, you have access to hundreds of templates and images from which you can choose. What’s more, if you have your own images, that you want to upload and alter, that’s just as simple as dragging and dropping a file.

Hey, look! This is my Christmas banner design, care of Canva

When you jazz up your social posts, with some funky images, or even video, you are much more likely to get social engagement. What would it do for your website visitors? 

Namecheap – Logo Design

You might already have a professional logo design, but if you don’t, there are a couple of free logo design sites that will help you out with that. 

If you’re going for a full rebrand or redesign of your website, you might want to do your logo too. Plenty of companies do it, even if it’s just minor tweaks for a more attractive look or remove any questionable elements.

Namecheap, you might know the name if you’ve been looking for a custom domain, has an elegant little logo design tool that is entirely free to use. It also has the benefit of allowing you to make multiples so you can compare your options.

Image Repositories…there are lots!

If you don’t have the professional images you would like for your website, there are millions available. Sometimes, the issue is finding the right ones.

You’ve probably already looked through Unsplash and Pexels, but have you looked at some other ones? If you want pictures for infographics and vectors, you can look through places like pxfuel, publicdomainpictures.net, and even Flickr.

HTML Templates, for that extra Oomph!

Most of the text boxes in the SimplyBook.me system are HTML ones. Sure you can use the simple formatting bar at the top of the text field, but if you’re feeling adventurous (or you have someone to help you) you can always switch to the coding mode and seriously jazz things up.

There are lots of free HTML test templates you can choose from on the web, but I like nicepage because it has individual block templates, if you don’t want a whole web page template.

The Importance of Updating Your Website

For optimal search visibility and ranking, you should be updating your website blog or news information between 2 and 4 times per week. These small updates ensure that you keep prompting the search engine web crawlers to index new content on your website. As far as search engines are concerned, new content means up-to-date and relevant. As relevance is a key factor in which websites get pride of place on the SERP, being up-to-date and relevant is vital.

If you don’t blog, and you don’t have to, keeping your website current is just as important. However, the necessity to update is not as frequent. For good customer experience and trust, you need to keep all of your information correct, current, and engaging. It’s vitally important that you ensure all contact information is perfect because nothing can lose you a client quicker than inaccurate contact details. Updates should probably happen at least every couple of months.

When it comes to the functionality and usefulness of your website, it doesn’t matter how good you are updating and refreshing your website, there comes a time when you need to rebuild. At most, your website has up to four years to remain functional, and by that, I mean fulfilling its requirements for the business. Technology moves so quickly that a website needs to develop right alongside it. A quick example would be mobile web technology. Now, it’s almost unthinkable that you might find a website that doesn’t display well on a smartphone, but 4 years ago there were many sites that still hadn’t embraced mobile optimisation, and tablet optimisation is another newer development.

Other reasons to update your website

There are other reasons, beyond SEO, functionality and customer experience that might compel you to make adjustments to your website. Things change, and you need to keep up with those changes.

• Perform A/B testing – that’s two versions of your website to test out which one gets the best feedback and engagement.
• Competitor Research – What are your competitors doing, that you should do better?
• Update Key Words and Phrases – Like everything else, search terms change. With the rise of voice search, use of natural language and question key phrases has increased. As language develops, so too do search terms.
• Update media usage – While longer and more informative content is both more shareable and more engaging, long sections of text are more difficult to navigate on a screen. Mix up media usage such as images, videos, text, audio(podcast), and maybe even a gif or meme for giggles.

There are so many reasons for updating your website. When you need to make adjustments and updates, it’s a good time to check whether there is anything else that needs doing to improve things. A good website audit is a great idea, as well as updating some keywords.

Whatever you do though, don’t rebuild or rewrite anything too much. You might want to see how well you rank for some of the common keyphrases and words for your industry. By completely changing all of your text, metadata, and other information, you could have a negative effect on your search ranking.