Dear Sopna,
1. Keeps you focused on your core business
One of the biggest challenges of maintaining a website is time. More often than not, business owners and marketing directors just don’t have time to keep up with it. More importantly, the highest and best use of their time is developing and driving their business and strategy.
Depending on your computer expertise, you oftentimes may end up spending more time trying to remember how to do what you need than it is worth. A good web agency can oftentimes achieve the same thing in a fraction of the time and bring in the knowledge of SEO and best practices at the same time.
2. Keep your costs down
Until your website warrants a full-time employee, it is often more cost-effective to work with an outside agency where you don’t have the added expense of healthcare, vacation time, unemployment insurance, and other costs and overhead associated with hiring employees. Likewise, you are able to reduce or eliminate training cost associated with employee turnover.
3. Leverage the expertise of dedicated web consultants
Is your strength in web technology? Do you love to write? Are you up on the latest in the changes in the search engine world? If not, then outsourcing your web maintenance may be for you.
When working with an agency, you gain access to a broad array of expertise all of which can be focused on helping you grow your business. These include experts in technology, graphic design, business writing, SEO and others.
Agencies can provide technological and other professional expertise that you may not have in-house. Additionally, a web agency has experience of managing many other websites that can be applied to your benefit.
4. Protect your site – Protect your reputation
The last thing you need to interrupt your day is a hacked website. Not only can it take up enormous amounts of your time, it can also cause a lack of trust with your visitors coming to your site.
One of the most frequent sources of hacking is not keeping up with the latest security patches. Typically, your web hosting company will maintain the server itself, but not the software actually running the website. That is the website owner’s responsibility.
It is a real challenge keeping up with each of the different extensions on your site and monitoring for new versions and security releases. Outside agencies are intimately familiar with the systems and regularly monitor for updates and maintain backups – keeping your site secure and your reputation in tact.
5. Maintain search engine optimization and growing customer traffic
Search engines continually update their algorithms and the competitive landscape is constantly in flux. Keeping up with the latest trends in search engine optimization and making regular updates and additions to your site content are critical to maintaining and improving your search engine ranking.
An outside agency can help you track your progress through web analytics, maintain blogs and other content, make recommendations on future strategy, and help you get the most out of your website investment.
Thanks.
Jeanne.
