Why a ‘Use It or Lose It’ Webpage Policy Benefits Your MSP

You want your website to best represent your MSP and the many services that you offer. As your central marketing hub, your website NEEDS to impress its visitors. To do so, it needs to be up-to-date and continuously maintained.

This is why we suggest setting a ‘use it or lose it’ policy when it comes to the pages on your website.

Why ‘Use It or Lose It?’

This mindset when it comes to your website is directly tied to the user experience of your website visitors. What will these people think when they come across:

• Incomplete Pages?: “Wow, it seems like quite a few pages here are still under construction. Maybe I should come back later when things are actually done.” If they even remember to come back to your website, you’re likely going to lose them if nothing has been added to these pages. 

• Outdated Pages?: “Clearly this company isn’t updating their website. Are they going to be showing the same lack of care to my business?” With this sort of response, you’ve already lost them to your competition. 

• No Longer Relevant Pages?: “Why is this page on their website when the salesperson I spoke to said that the company no longer offers this service? I’d rather partner with a company who is more straightforward about their service offerings.” Similar to the last response, you’ve already lost them if they are thinking this way.

These are just a few examples of responses, but they hold pretty true to what your clients and prospects are going to think.

Since MSPs are a part of the Technology Industry, it’s much more important for you to have a stellar website than it is for a lot of other businesses. So, when people who are searching for your service offerings land on a grossly outdated page or one that is mostly blank, it’s likely that they’re not going to think so highly of your business.

What should you be doing instead?

‘Unpublished’ Is Your Friend

Just because you don’t have any content on one of your pages doesn’t mean that you never will! By “lose it,” we don’t mean that you have to delete it completely.

Let’s imagine that you want to have a Testimonials page so that prospects visiting your website can see how happy your current customers are. The problem is, you don’t have any testimonials collected yet. If you set up a page now, it would be missing the information that these prospects are looking for.

To remedy this, you can build a Testimonials page in the back end of your website, and set it to be ‘Unpublished’. This way, the page is built and can be quickly published once you receive some positive feedback from your clients. To push the process along in this scenario, you could run a Testimonial Campaign that pushes your clients to a landing page where they can submit feedback via a form. Once you’ve received a few positive responses, you can add them to your unpublished Testimonials page, and then publish it so it can be accessed by those who visit your website.

Keep this in mind when you’re worried about getting rid of one of your pages that you expect to use in the future.

Your SEO

With some of your pages being unpublished, you may be worried that your search engine optimization efforts may be hurt. These pages that you aren’t using may include some keywords that you’re trying to rank for, so why should you unpublish these pages?

The thing is, you shouldn’t be thinking of your SEO as ONLY keywords. It’s certainly a big part of it, but not the only thing you need to be concerned about.

Things such as user experience also affects your ranking. Think about it: If a website visitor arrives on an extremely outdated or mostly blank page on your website, they’re probably going to bounce pretty quickly from that page and possibly even your website altogether. The more pages that you have like this, the worse it is going to look for your company.

Instead of worrying how your SEO will be negatively affected by fewer keyword mentions, work on refining your SEO and Content Marketing strategy instead.

Do I Have To Remove My Marketing Content?

You may have a lot of content that is a part of your marketing initiatives. This content may be inbound content that is ongoing, such as your blogs. You may have some deliverables such as case studies, whitepapers, and brochures. Should you be removing those if you aren’t actively using them?

For the most part, the answer is going to be no.

You can keep the majority of your downloadable deliverables up on your website. Even if you aren’t actively marketing with them, they may be a part of a future campaign that you run, or are a great value-add for your website visitors. However, you may consider fixing up your older deliverables with any branding-related or template-based changes you’ve made over the years. If you have a deliverable that will now be of no use to your website visitors now, you can certainly remove those from your website.

Blogs are the best exception to this “use it or lose it” rule. Having blogs that go back a number of years adds to your credibility as a managed service provider because it shows that you have been attempting to educate the public for quite some time. Instead of removing a blog that was written based on an outdated concept, you can consider writing a new blog with how that content is in the present day. You can take it a step further and actually link to that new blog at the top of your old blog so that those who arrive at your old blog can easily access the new, updated information.

Does Your Website Need An Overhaul?

Are you feeling completely lost when it comes to fixing up your website? If so, then you can turn to us. We can design you a custom website, created with your target audience in mind.

In addition to fixing up your website design and the user experience that goes with it, during our proposal process, we will meticulously go through your website pages and determine what should be transferred over to your new website. If you have any pages that you want to keep but don’t want to be published, we will set them to be Unpublished for you. You don’t have to worry; a member of our Web Team will train you how to make changes to your website so you can easily adjust which pages you want published and which you don’t. We can even make changes for you ourselves.

You can learn more about our Custom MSP Websites by visiting our service page or scheduling a demo.