Posted: 2013-01-31 17:35:20
Gaining new website traffic and additional leads can be easier than you would think. Often it just takes a little time and focus.
There was a time in the distant past when web searching was based on indexes compiled by humans. This gave a reasonably clear picture about how websites could be constructed to ensure indexing and at least have a shot at getting some decent traffic and leads from that.
Then the robots took over and the whole business of promoting your site became a mysterious art form and, for a while, it was the guys doing the black arts that were winning the game.
However, over the years, the chief robot (Google) has been working tirelessly to rule out the effectiveness of the black arts and it seems that the end result has been a drift back to fundamentally what is on a site that is winning.
Content is king and it probably always was. Hubspot have this week issued a report on a survey of 7000 of their subscribers and it presents some interesting results that go to the heart of what can be achieved by, frankly, just focus and content volume.
There is a clear correlation between the numbers of pages on a website and the traffic that can be expected. Companies surveyed with 51 to 100 pages on their website claimed to generate 48% more traffic than companies with 1 to 50 pages.
That is pretty linear: double your pages and get 50% more traffic. The graph continues along these lines until we get to around 1000 pages when the traffic takes a substantial leap upwards. Still linear, but on a much steeper angle.
Perhaps of more interest is the claim that companies with 101 to 200 pages generate 2.5 times more leads than those with 50 or fewer pages. This again is reasonably linear up to about 300 pages when it starts to curve upwards and looks more like an exponential progression.
Okay, there are some caveats to this in that Hubspot customers are generally aggressive online marketers and do quite a bit of other stuff than just add pages to their site. However, the message still comes through that the more content you have on your website, the more you can achieve with the website.
Numbers of pages, or volume of site content, is clearly a measure of the level of effort / input put into the site overall. It is reassuring therefore to see that those that put the effort in, get the payback they deserve and that success no longer relies on black arts.
For the very large constituency of businesses that think their website is 'finished' and requires no more content, or effort, this should be very interesting stuff.
If not, then their website really might be finished.