Congratulations. Launching a website is a big deal. We should know, we launch a lot of websites. But now that design, development, and quality assurance testing are done and you’ve launched your site, that doesn’t mean that you can kick up your feet and relax.

No, your work is just beginning.

Your website is a living, breathing part of your sales team. You need to make sure you keep it going. Here are some tips to do that:

1. Monthly Website Maintenance
2. Weekly Blog Writing
3. Content refreshes

1. Monthly Website Maintenance

The biggest part of keeping up with your website are the small monthly maintenance tasks. At first these tasks may take a while to run through. Over time the process is quicker and there will (hopefully) be fewer items for you to update. You know what helps? Putting together a schedule for you to stick to.

The first and most important thing you should do every month is check in with Google Webmaster Tools. We’ve talked about Webmaster Tools in the past and why it’s important to keep up with them. Checking in on your HTML errors, 404 errors, indexed pages, and site maps each month and fixing problems can save you so many headaches down the road. You don’t want to find out that Google lowered your placement in search results due to a few easily fixed problems, right?

2. Weekly Blog Writing

Your website needs a blog. Blogging helps expand the reach of your content by giving search engines new pages to crawl and index. A blog is additional pages that are information rich, and Google loves these pages. Why you ask?  Google loves crawling and indexing pages, and having new pages to search helps your placement in search results. Helpful content indexed by Google is a good thing. Writing blogs also helps build up your status as a thought leader in your industry.

But writing blogs is hard you say? No, it’s not. You can write a great blog post in an hour or less.

3. Content Refreshes

Think of your website as your car.

Hopefully every 3,000 miles or so you take your car to get an oil change. You also do a major tune up at the recommended intervals for your vehicle. Your website needs the same type of work. Keywords, headings, title tags, and body content can get stale and out of date. Do you work in an ever changing industry like law, medicine, insurance or technology? Keep in mind content on your website may go out of date even quicker than other industries, so update yours accordingly.

Take a few hours every month or so to go through your site page by page and review your content. There is always room for improvements and updates. Also, don’t forget to take your website through the car wash. And make sure to vacuum up those french fries off the floor. What kind of website do you run, anyway!?

Now ask yourself a few final questions. Have I updated my website in the last few years? Is my site a responsive site?

This article originally appeared on LyntonWeb.