HOW OFTEN TO UPDATE WEBSITE CONTENT
Once you have a website, you begin to understand how important it is to update website content. By not adding new articles and page content to your site, you risk boring your visitors who may soon stop returning; however, updating too frequently may risk diminishing returns and cause your costs to skyrocket. Rising content costs can become increasingly expensive for companies that involve many people in their content and website design process. So, what is the optimum schedule as you consider how often to update website content?
Whether you update website content yourself or have hired a web development company to do this for you, you can check your web statistics to develop an updating strategy. These statistics should be able to tell you how often visitors come to your site and with what frequency. The trick is to establish a pattern of visitation, so that you can update website content often enough to reward visitors with new content every time they come to your site. If the bulk of your visitors are coming to your site one or two times a month, adding new content several times a week is likely counterproductive; on the other hand, only adding new content every couple of months means that your visitors may notice “stale content” and eventually be turned off. An update frequency that is not coordinated with the rate people visit your site may become a real problem for your site’s effectiveness.
Other useful information that can come from web statistics includes a look at more specific content areas within your site. Look for the numbers behind:
- Each directory
- Each application
- Each page
- Key areas of your site (which pages are the most popular? Which have the greatest profit impact for your business?)
Remember that although web statistics can tell you how often to update website content, they cannot tell you how often you should actually do so. This decision to add fresh content depends not only on what visitors do on your site, but also on what your Internet competitors are doing. Your strategy should involve both keeping an eye on your own content and keeping an eye on your competitors.
Directory One uses a proven approach to Search Engine Marketing in Houston that includes a method to update website content, as well as the opportunity to keep tabs on your business competitors. Website updating is a dynamic process and is best handled by experienced professionals who approach it with the proper analytical tools. Directory One stands ready to offer those services to our clients with a proven track record of customer success and business growth.