By “dynamic” here I don’t mean “exciting.” I mean changing. When people come to visit your site on Monday, it has something different from when they visited on Friday.
Search engines like new content. People do, too. People who idly drop by to see what’s new will, when someday they need services like yours, think of you and drop by purposefully. Occasional customers who find your content useful will become regular customers. It increases your value to your visitors and makes your site more interesting.
The obvious way to do this is with a blog. What if a blog just isn’t for you?
(You might want to check the comments at “Does Every Website Need a Blog?” before you decide, though.)
Anyway, if you decide against a blog, there are still ways to arrange for dynamic content at your website.
Change your website often
You can change other parts of your website instead of using a blog to add fresh content. You can add new pages, update your home page, offer new white papers, and change out your headers.
If your website is designed to support this option, you can use homepage widgets to provide a new experience every time your visitors arrive. You will still need to provide fresh content on a regular basis to get the best SEO results, but a focus on user experience can bring visitors back often.
Share your knowledge
Your website can be a resource for specialized knowledge. Create a collection of healthy recipes, collect articles and documents that answer people’s questions, or make a wiki on your subject of expertise.
Adding fresh content in this way can have many of the SEO advantages of blogging, but it doesn’t have the same time pressure blogging does. Your goal here is to keep all the content on your website evergreen: up to date, high quality answers to questions your target market often searches for.
Host a discussion
The right topic can grow a lively discussion forum. People with an interest in your particular subject will hang out there the way they do at Facebook. They may even be willing to pay for the privilege, which is a nice perk you can obtain after your forum becomes successful.
You’ll need to build a forum with a plugin like BuddyPress. You will also need to nurture the conversation to begin with. As few as three strong participants can sustain you till you gain some momentum. At that point, you can keep things rolling with limited time and effort.
As with any kind of crowdsourced content, you will always have to monitor the input.
Let people play
Tools, toys, and apps can bring people to your website repeatedly. Music samples, rotating videos, and other media options can do the same. The Death Clock will calculate your personal life expectancy for you, for example, and has already done so for more than nine million people.
A death clock is probably not the perfect tool for your website (one is enough), but it makes the point. You’ll need to put in some effort and investment up front and you may need to update the technology now and then, but this kind of content can bring people back repeatedly.
Have featured products
Your local grocery store uses this trick. It used to amaze me when I saw grocery store flyers shouting “Canned tuna! 99 cents!” when 99 cents was the regular price. Why, I wondered, would people be deceived by this? It really isn’t deceitful, though. Some customers may assume that featured items are on sale, but many are simply reminded of them. “Ah, tuna!” they think. “I haven’t had that in a while,” and they buy some.
If you have an e-commerce element, classes, or services you can show as a product, change your featured products every couple of weeks. Visitors will come to see what’s new or just new to them.
How is this different from a blog?
These options will keep search engines aware of you and freshen up your website — if you keep up with them. They may or may not be less time-consuming or less expensive than blogging.
You should plan to use an editorial calendar to stay on track with these approaches just as you would with a blog. However, there is less urgency with these other options — visitors may not notice if you don’t update regularly, as they probably will with a blog. Realistically, this can mean that you just don’t make updates.
If you like the idea of dynamic content but you don’t have the time to make it happen, contact us. We can help.
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