What is “Managed Web Services”? Well, the short answer is it’s a service that a company or contractor offers where they manage all your website’s tasks. This can range depending on the website or what you need, and what they specifically offer, but typically includes things such as: plugin updates, security updates, content updates, sometimes includes actual content writing/blog posting, and even hosting.
So, does “Managed Web Services” make sense for you? That depends on your company’s needs and the resources you currently have dedicated to managing your website. To help you decide if you could benefit from Managed Web Services, we will outline 5 important benefits to using a managed web service program.
1.
Managed Web Services Are Cost Effective!
For most companies it doesn’t make financial sense to hire or dedicate one person inside the company to manage its website maintenance. The knowledge and time needed from one team member to efficiently manage a website is too intimidating and easy for inexperienced users to make mistakes. This is why it is common to outsource the maintenance of business websites.
For most websites, regular maintenance and minor content updates can be just a few hours per month which will keep your site running smoothly and safely. Even for more involved websites where there are regular content updates (new employees added, company news items, or even blog posts) can usually be completed in 4-8 hours per month. That means you can have your company’s website completely managed for you for as low as $200/month.
2.
Augment Your Existing Team With a Web Expert
Do you already have someone on your team that is proficient in website maintenance? Does that person have the bandwidth to keep your website up to date? If the answer is “yes” to both of those questions, you are probably in good shape.
However, almost all teams can use an extra hand, and having a Managed Digital Services plan to help manage the day to day of you website can augment your existing team without adding a full time employee. While it’s sometimes preferable to have all your tasks managed in house, sometimes that’s not possible with other initiatives or lack of resources. Having a partner manage your website, while also being a resource to answer questions about your website or even help train your team on how to do various tasks is a efficient, cost effective way to making sure your website isn’t neglected. You can simply provide your website manager a to-do list of tasks that you would like completed on your site each month or, in some cases your web manager can just run with a broad objective and complete tasks to best achieve those goals.
3.
It’s Crucial Your Website Stay Updated
Your website is a direct reflection of of your business. If your website has outdated material, or has been updated incorrectly so images/text looks broken or is out of place, it can give customers a negative impression of your company. Worse yet, if your site becomes compromised or hacked, it could even pass along malicious code/viruses to your visitors. This is why website maintenance is so important.
Website downtime not only gets penalized by Google affecting your search engine rankings (SEO), but it can also make visitors question the legitimacy of the company. Out of date content can cause Google to negatively rank your website, and your potential customers will notice, giving them a negative view of your company as a whole. These things that can have a very detrimental impact on your business if your website is not regularly maintained. Having a partner manage your website’s updates is a great way to make sure the important items are attended to while your team focuses on growing your business.
4.
A More Engaging & More Effective Website
Having a resource that is proficient in web development to help make your website more engaging will ultimately make your website a more effective sales tool for your company/brand.
We are strong advocates for building websites that are functional tools for companies that they are able to use/leverage themselves to keep up to date. We do this by implementing a easy to use, drag and drop framework when we build our client’s websites, so even if they have no coding experience, they can make most of their regular content updates.
For some of our clients, they sometimes have no interest or resources to manage their website or they want to create a landing page above and beyond an update to their website. In these circumstances, having an outsourced “Managed Web Services” plan in place allows them to make the most efficient, and engaging website for their company.
5.
Optimizing Your Website For Search
Google and other search engines continually update their algorithms and keeping the competitive landscape constantly in flux. Keeping up with the latest changes to these algorithms as well as what your competition is doing from a web content perspective, is crucial to increasing your ranking in search. Search engine optimization benefits from making regular updates and additions to your site are crucial to improving your search engine ranking.
So, even if your website has been tagged for your key search terms at one point in time, these gains have diminishing returns over time. With search, content is king. Making sure your website has the proper keywords that your customers are searching for is the only way to increase traffic of the right audience for you.
Many managed web service packages can include SEO maintenance. This usually includes updating existing pages, making sure your pages reflect accurately the keywords you are trying to rank for. It includes making sure that your site has proper meta descriptions so when you do show up in search results, users can see what your page is about. And, it can include actual content writing. This could be adding keyword rich content to existing pages each month, and/or creating relevant blog posts or news posts on your website. This content is the best way to help get your website to out rank your competition!
If you want to learn more about Managed Web Services and how outsourcing the day to day maintenance of your website can help your business, please drop us a line!
