When building a website there is a tendency to “build and forget”. Whether this comes down to the initial enthusiasm for the project running out or just the belief that once your website is out there your job is finished I don’t know. However, in terms of business, your website is there to either attract new customers, inform current customers or in most cases both of the above. By allowing your information to go out of date your information becomes useless, by not updating your website you’ll attract less visitors and new customers, but why?
Over the last 5 years I’ve studied statistics associated with dozens of websites, some of which have been updated regularly, some of which get updated seldom and others that never get updated. The 2 statistics that have stood out to me most are :-
- Total Visitors
- Search Engine Referrals
Ignoring traffic brought from sites creating new links to your website there is a pattern that occurs for sites with regular updates, sites that are rarely updated and sites that are never updated.
Regularly Updated Websites
After initially being indexed by the search engines and then included in the search results, traffic builds until it reaches a plateux. The number of total visitors and search engine referrals remains consistent, occasionally peaking when new content is added on relatively popular subjects. Over a period of years the traffic these sites receive both in total and via the search engines is an upward trend.
Occasionally Updated Websites
After initially being indexed by the search engines and then included in the search results, traffic builds until it reaches a plateux. This level remains for several months and then traffic to the website starts to dip, slowly at first but then gathering pace. As a new update is performed, overall search referalls show a sharpe spike which is also reflected in the number of visitors to the site. Obviously this depends on the nature of the update but in my experience even structural changes to a “stale” website has brought about this peak. The overall trend for these sites over a period of years has been silimar to that of a rollercoaster. Up & down but with a downward slope.
Websites That Are Never Updated
After initially being indexed by the search engines and then included in the search results, traffic builds until it reaches a plateux. It’s all down hill from there! After months the number of search engine referrals decreases, being mirrored by the total number of visitors to your website. A quick check on Google, MSN and Yahoo shows that search placement for all your major keywords is slipping just as quickly as the popularity of your website. After 12 months I have seen a website that initially was attracting 200 unique visitors a day slip to only attracting 2-3. On average, the websites that were not updated appeared to be attracting around 5% of the visitors they had initially attracted after 18 months of not being updated.
For a business that is using their website as a marketing/sales tool than this affect can be dramatic on your bottom line. As the number of visitors to your website decreases so by rights will the number of conversions to customers that you see.
The next question is how often is regular? In my experience I see dips starting to appear after a website has been left alone for 2-4 weeks. Personally I don’t like to leave any of my own websites more than a month without adding some new content, in an ideal world for companies that can’t provide daily updates, then weekly or fortnighly updates would appear to optimal. An update can be new content, a change to existing content or even website structure changes. Obviously new content is by far the best update you can make, although changes to previously popular pages can also prove beneficial.
At the end of the day your website will be your most cost effective marketing tool, don’t spoil it by not keeping it updated.