The clients I service for custom website design who return for changes or upgrades "get it" when I advise people to add orignal quality content often.
Having a website with over 650 Google page one listings for web design related phrases in less than a year since consciously optimizing my site last June, I share how-to with clients for duplicating that success, and in a phrase the secret is "add original quality content often".
A strategy of launch a site and forget it violates that principle for success because Google rewards websites with better ranking in search results if they update continually to provide an improved visitor experience.
If you don't track statistics for your site visitors and let your service provider update you, those stats could be misleading. A client I first met had one of those reports stating their site had "over 1500 hits a week", yet the client was surprised having zero new prospects contact them.
The important number is not hits which is a call to the server for content including graphics, but the number of unique visitors. One page with 10 graphics visited by 10 people gets 100 hits just for those graphics. If you can't make the time to track stats, at least insist on reports of page loads and unique visitors.
Measuring effectiveness of an advertising campaign compared to your website traffic requires metrics with factual data. Knowing how people found you allows you to make decisions about the best way to allocate your advertising budget. If your website draws the traffic print ads do not, the focus and budget may be better spent on adding new content to your website.
Search engines treat sites differently than 4-5 years ago, and how people find you has changed, too. Today the majority of people looking for a product or service search online first. Business owners who routinely ask "How did you find us?" can measure site performance compared to print advertising. Tracking trends, a major local newspaper downsized the layout and number of pages and the pinch in ad revenue goes beyond the current economy.
Know what works. If the return on investment for print ads is less than you pay, and your website brings new prospects, it is time to invest those dollars into expanding your site to avoid the pitfalls of a launch and forget web design.
TAGS: advertising advice hits statistics web designLabels: advice, general, launch, websites