Having an effective marketing strategy in place is essential for any small business owner looking to improve their lead generation and sales. Part of that strategy is keeping your website and social media channels updated.

When it comes to search engine optimisation, keeping your website up to date is one of the easiest ways of climbing those rankings. Just the act of adding some content, or making a change to the design is enough to alert the Google ‘spiders’ that your website is ready to be ‘crawled’. Basically, it means your website gets scanned. The results then go through a series of algorithms that determine where your website ends up in those search results.

If you’re updating your website on a frequent basis, search engines then know it is active, up to date and relevant to their users – all essential for ranking well in search results.

The same principle applies with your social media channels – only this time, you’re alerting your target audience that you are still alive and kicking. I bet you’ve wandered onto a suggested Twitter profile only to find they haven’t posted anything new for several months. It’s not a promising sign, is it?

The added benefit of posting regularly on your social media profiles is that this adds to your SEO too. Another tried and tested optimisation technique is ‘link building’ – finding high quality external links out from your website, and back in to your website. As social media channels are widely used and highly optimised, they carry a high score with Google and other search engines – meaning that when you link back to your website from these sites you’re slowly improving your website’s ‘authority’.

The good news is that this time-consuming task can easily be outsourced to a virtual assistant who already has the website and social media skills you’re struggling to master.

With a good understanding of your target audience, products, services and marketing goals – a virtual assistant can write social media updates, schedule them to post at the appropriate times, and scour the analytics for the important data and statistics that you need to know.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t use those social media profiles at the same time – personal interaction remains important and no one can know your business better than you, so it’s still essential to spend some time engaging with your followers. Although this can all be done through a shared social media dashboard, such as Hootsuite, so you can see the scheduled updates and response when you need to.

Some website designers and agencies will charge you a lot to update content on your website – there’s no need when you have a website savvy virtual assistant to hand.

Adding and updating content on your website can be a tricky task when you’re not sure what you are doing. That doesn’t mean you should spend vast sums of money to have someone else do it for you. A good virtual assistant will back up your website, alter or add the content how you want it and ensure the website is still working as it should.

Another benefit of having a VA manage your website content and social media updates, is that a fresh pair of eyes can see the gaps that might be missing from your marketing strategy, or where you might be going wrong – and try a different approach for better results. Having the knowledge and experience that comes from using multiple social media channels with different target audiences, is the ability to bring that expertise to your business.

Strong credibility and reputation is important when it comes to managing a business in today’s internet driver world, and a regularly updated website and active social media presence is one of the best ways of reinforcing that to your target audience.

To find out more about how Banks’ Business Solutions can take care of your website and social media, get in touch today.