How to Keep Your Website Updated with the help of a Virtual Website Assistant

When was the last time you updated your website? Sure, if you have someone dedicated to this role, like a virtual website assistant, this question doesn’t apply to you. These entities assist with not just designing your website but also adding new layouts, formats, landing pages, and security features.

Alternatively, website virtual assistants (VAs) also coordinate with designers and copywriters to keep posting the latest content on your website.

More and more companies are relying on remote virtual assistance

But what if you haven't hired one at this point and are merely considering this option? You most certainly cannot hold off on updating your website. After all, it is an elaborate visiting card for your business. Ergo, you cannot delay hiring a virtual assistant to keep your web pages up to date.

Without a user-friendly and updated website, where will you direct your organic traffic generated via different marketing platforms? Your landing pages are often the last mile of conversion. Safe to say, you run the risk of perishing if you don’t have a competent virtual assistant running a well-maintained and updated website.

Imagine a lead visiting your website only to find a dated landing page that doesn't provide any relevant information. This can severely hurt your brand equity. Avoid this with the help of a virtual website assistant.

What nuanced tactics does a virtual website assistant employ to keep your site up to date?

A seasoned virtual website assistant acknowledges that a company website has several moving parts, which they break down into three parts. They are:

1. Security
2. Content
3. Design

After forming this basic framework, your virtual website assistant further divides these three things into sub-elements. This provides them the key levers to work upon while updating your website. Not all levers may require updating simultaneously, but they check each to know which is dated and needs revision in a particular cycle. And, this is no small task!

A virtual assistant’s roadmap to updating your website

Typically, a virtual website assistant begins with the security element of your website. This is especially critical if you collect visitor contact information through your web portal. Within security, they keep the following three parameters updated.

1. ‘Security’

Hosting platform

Sure, you might be using a specific hosting platform for several months or years. It may offer pocket-friendly services.

Enter a virtual assistant who either self-conducts a quick audit or asks your data person to check if there have been incidents of a security breach, information leakage, and website downtime in the near past. Such breaches are conclusive that your hosting platform does not have a robust developer community.

If they find that such things have taken place, they will either inform their superiors to update/change their hosting platform, or do it themselves. The latter will require awarding executionary powers to your virtual website assistant. To ensure the best possible hosting platform, you can consider consulting web hosting reviews to make an informed decision.

SaaS plugins

Your website often utilizes plugins for additional functionality. For instance, you may use plugins for automating pop-ups, forms, etc. Unfortunately, unethical hackers may scope vulnerabilities in these third-party plugins and gain access to confidential information on your website’s backend. Heck, they may hack your website.

To avoid this, a virtual website assistant will check whether all your plugins are up-to-date. If not, they will update them. Plugin publishers keep sending bug fixes and security updates, and virtual web assistants install them for enhanced security. Moreover, if they don't trust a plugin publisher, any longer, they find an alternative plugin provider.

2. ‘Content’

Text

Since this is an update audit, virtual website assistants don’t need to rewrite the content for your website. It is also not their area of expertise.

However, what falls under their purview is checking the overall relevance of the content. Their core philosophy behind this activity is to feature useful content that builds trust. Here is how they do it.

• Virtual assistants can check the content for crispness, and whether it communicates the benefits of your products or services.
• They may seek a content creator to articulate grammar as per your target market, or may do it themselves. For instance, if you cater to C-suites in the UK, a virtual website assistant can pinpoint any American expressions or words that need to be removed.
• They may remove any salesy lingo.
• They will certainly glean through your competitor’s website to know the kind of text and sentence articulation they use. Regardless of whether your virtual assistant finds it outdated or updated, they may use the text there as a benchmark.
  

Imagery

A virtual website assistant will keep your website free from outdated imagery. To do this, they will likely employ the following best practices.

• Remove any color scheme from the 70s, 80s, and 90s. This includes neon colors.
• Reach out to your employees to provide their latest pictures for the company website. Their old pictures with crimped or permed hairstyles and corduroy suits might not work for your company unless you make retro products.
• They will ensure all images used are of optimal resolution.
• They will update the latest images of your offerings on your website .

Calendars

Virtual website assistants will check whether your website calendars are up-to-date. This is especially important if you hold events periodically. Your website must not still feature dates of your past events.

Broken links

Nothing disengages a lead or visitor than being redirected to a page with a “404 Not Found Error”. But, removing or replacing every broken link is a time consuming task, which is diligently fulfilled by a virtual website assistant.

Social media icons

Your website must only feature social media icons on which your business handle posts interesting content regularly. For example, if your website is still carrying an icon of Google+, the visitor knows it is ignored. A virtual assistant can help you avoid this scenario by checking on your social media handles and updating them to your website regularly.

Contact and business hour details

This tiny piece of content is especially critical if you have a brick-and-mortar store or a physical office space. Unfortunately, this information may keep changing from time to time. A virtual website assistant will be sure to mention the updated address, latest hours of operation, holidays and special occasions to your website.

SEO keywords

The world wide web is a noisy place with several websites scoping for visitors. How do you rise above this confusion? By infusing the right SEO or Search Engine Optimization practices through content.

SEO involves inserting certain keywords and phrases that your potential customers are using to look for a product or solution. Your virtual website assistant can search for the latest keywords by using SaaS reporting tools for SEO like SEM Rush, Moz, etc.

You can also hire a separate virtual assistant that specializes in SEO-strategy. However, if you only require help in scouting the right keywords and inserting them or following up with your content team to insert them, a virtual website assistant will do.

Once your virtual assistant infuses your website or blog site's content with the right keywords, or gets your content team to do it, you stand an excellent chance of landing in the top 5 search results on Google. We don't need to tell you how critical achieving this feat is for sales and marketing. You can also consult a virtual assistant who specializes in SEO practices to stay ahead of the curve.

Bear in mind that SEO keywords keep changing, which is why you cannot insert them and think your job is done. Your virtual assistant must keep looking for the latest keywords and updating your web content accordingly.

3. ‘Design’

Your website must carry the latest design. This includes the right color scheme, layout, fontology, and much more. Here are a few hacks your virtual website assistant will apply to update your website's design.

Layout

They will update your website layout as per the following latest trends.

• A virtual assistant can develop web page hierarchy. How? By placing your top assets first. For example, your web page must always carry your logo and business name on top, followed by your top products. They can check if the layout hierarchy is maintained.
• They can identify redundancies and ambiguities on your web pages. For example, if a landing page’s key intention is to present a product feature, it should not talk about how it is part of your flagship series. Virtual website assistants can point out any such landing pages to you.
• They can identify the web pages that lack a Call-to-Action or CTA. This prompts or informs the visitor on what they should do next.
• They will check your website for clutter, and rid it for eyes to smoothly glide across.
• They can search for images, videos, or some pictorial content for pages that only carry text.
  

Themes

Excellent example of a minimalist-themed website a virtual website assistant can help create| Source

The Victorian style spread-out writing died when British Imperialism did! Today, your web page must look minimalist. You can seek your virtual website assistant’s help to research on minimalistic and other relevant themes, so your pages look aligned to today’s graphic sensibilities.

Fonts

When the Victorian style is dated, why continue using fonts that remind of those times? Your virtual assistant can rid your website of any serif fonts, like Times New Roman, etc. They can update your content using fonts like Helvetica, Verdana, etc. Know that Helvetica is considered one of the most legible and clean fonts.

Two cents on policing your website

By now, you can see that keeping your website updated is a ton of work. It's enough to distract you from the core tasks your teams must perform. This is precisely why a task as critical yet laborious as this must be outsourced to a virtual assistant.

Where can I find professionally trained virtual website assistants?

Short answer – Wishup.co.

In a nutshell, our core philosophy revolves around helping entrepreneurs build cost-effective and skilled remote teams. Through us, you can hire virtual assistants with niche specializations, including website maintenance and updating.

Why hire through us?

Hiring a virtual assistant is the easiest thing you will do today

We grant you access to global talent – our network of professionals spans across domestic boundaries. Through us, you can hire a website assistant in any part of the world, as long as they have the skills you require. Never again will you be bound by geography.

We train associated professionals in-house – one of the most significant reasons behind our success is that we train all of our personnel in-house. This way, you shorten your remote virtual assistant's learning curve and save the time and costs involved in training them to handle tasks.

Quick onboarding – At Wishup.co, our network of virtual website assistants are already hired and ready to take up work. After a free consultation with us and a quick optional chat with them, they can begin work within 24 hours.

Quick replacement policy – Even though we only feature top-quality candidates, you may want a replacement. For this, we have an instant replacement policy, and that too, no questions asked.

We run background checks so you don’t have to - working with a remote professional is not much different than working with an on-site employee. Here, too, you will have to share sensitive data, and provide passwords, user ids, etc. so they can update your website. For this, you need someone with honest credentials and credibility. To ensure this, we run background checks on all our staff, and request them to sign NDAs before they come and work for you.

Try before you hire - we acknowledge you may have apprehensions even if a virtual website assistant has well-trained and experienced. This is why Wishup offers a 7-day free trial with your choice of VA. You can subscribe to our services only if you are entirely satisfied with the free trial.

Hire Today!

Hire a virtual website assistant so that you, as an entrepreneur, can focus on building and scaling your business. No, don’t get your sales and marketing reps or even data managers to maintain and update your website. For, like you, they too, are burdened with a myriad of core tasks.

As you can see, keeping a website up to date is indeed a laborious activity. Designating your departmental staff will only waste their precious time. And, since this isn’t their core competency, they may fail to do a worthy job.

What’s more, why would you pay sales or marketing professionals high salaries, for having them update your website? Instead, get a virtual website assistant who works remotely, which means, they come at a lower price, and do a phenomenal job; especially if you hire them from Wishup.co.

So, what are you waiting for? Book a free consultation and drop an email at [email protected]