Is Your Small Business Website Incomplete? Don't Worry, It's Okay

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; the pages skimpy 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. One can understand and reason. The other can only process data its programmed to collect.

What's interesting is how 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 really never becomes 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 the phrase over and over again when it comes 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, its 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Simply put no matter how great, original, and useful a site is, once it is no longer active there's no reason for search engines to crawl it again. The entire purpose for a sitemap is to alert search engines there's new content on a site. The search engines don't return until that time.

Blogging for Business

Search engines love blogs, period. The reason being most website pages are static. There's nothing new added. 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 has to publish new articles on a regular basis. 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.