Hey! Tanzanian Businesses, Update your websites!

The other week I was doing some research on a Tanzanian company and I decided to use my personal assistant, aka. ChatGPT, to pull information on that company. What I got was some information on them that was 4 years out of date.

"Oh ChatGPT, hallucinating again I see. Or could it be..."

I opened the sources and checked the company's website.

"Ah, yes. Another Tanzanian website left collecting dust."

It's quite common to see a lot of Tanzanian businesses disregarding their websites. When asked, they often say, "Ah, the website is already up, there's no reason to update it." or respond with, "People will check our socials if they see that the website is old, it's fiiine."

But they forget, people aren't the only ones looking at their websites.

In the past, and even now, we have bots from search engines checking our websites for information that they serve to their audience, who are your potential customers & partners. And with the current growth and wide-spread use of AI LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity AI sending out even more bots that are hungry for information to serve to their users, it's now more important than ever to keep your website up to date.

But you may lament, "But we update our social media with all the information people need, not many people look at our website so we use that instead."

That's all well and good, but having an up to date website can help you out more than you may think it does, especially when it comes to discovery. It opens up opportunities, making it easy for your business to be discovered when a potential customer is researching goods or services in your field, be it done with Google or ChatGPT.

You may be keeping your socials updated, but it's quite difficult to search or discover products & services on socials. And this applies particularly on IG where a lot of Tanzanian businesses have migrated to, unless the customer already knows

the business. It's a social platform, not a marketplace. Not yet anyways.

As a business, your website is the home for information on your business and the place where your business presents itself to the world and can be discovered. It's important to keep it updated, because if you don't, who will?

So, if you want to make it easy for your customers to look for your products & services or avoid scrambling to update your site with 3 years of information at once when an opportunity arises, make it a habit to at least update your website once a year, or as often as you need to.

Your future self and customers will thank you. Cheers.