Most of our customers come to us wanting a website. They may or may not have specific ideas about design, content, functionality. Once the website is set up, they tell all their mates and business associates about it. They have a huge first month of traffic on the new website and get heaps of compliments. Mission accomplished!
Website traffic way down after the first month of going live
Fast forward a few months, and things are not so rosy. Traffic has declined. Bounce rates (the number of visitors who come to your website and immediately leave without looking further) are up. The graph has a sad downward trend. Why?
Number one reason: because you aren’t keeping your web content fresh and your visitors have nothing new to look at. Think of your website as a car. You can spend a lot of money buying a car, and it will go well for a while – until it runs out of petrol. If you want it to keep getting you places, you need to keep it maintained and gassed up. New content is the petrol in your website’s car. Just as you get demoralised when you see the same old magazine every time in the dentist’s office, web visitors will get demoralised seeing the same old crusty content on your website every time they visit and they’ll probably stop visiting.
Then there’s the search engines. Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search aggregators rank sites with frequently updated content higher than sites with stale or static content.
So how do I keep content fresh?
The easy answer is: add new pages or posts to your website on a weekly or (at the very least) monthly basis. And make it easy for new or returning visitors to find that new content. The content doesn’t even have to be entirely “new”. For instance I have a customer who posts photos of the wedding dresses she makes into galleries – some of the galleries are focused on the bride (which draws in traffic from the bride and her circle of friends), and others are focused on the style of dress (which draws in traffic from people looking for, say, lace wedding dresses). The image itself is the same, but is presented in a different context for different audiences.
New content doesn’t have to be an article or essay. It can be a post with an interesting link or image, or a brief observation on something you think might be of interest to your customers. Chances are if it is interesting to you in your line of work, it will be interesting to people visiting your website to look for your products or services.
Charity begins at home
This post was prompted by a peek at the latest website stats for esoap.co.nz. Ouch. Tells me we aren’t putting up enough compelling content. Mid year resolution: practice what you preach.
That bounce rate should be telling you something
