As most of you know, DMS are very good at building websites. Over the last several years we have built a significant team of developers, interface designers, graphic artists, copy writers and others who, together, have produced some amazing results for our customers.

One of our biggest difficulties when developing a new site for our clients is often getting content from the client.

Last year we noticed a trend; the most successful client sites that we had were ones where the customers heavily involved themselves in the development and publication of content on their site, not just upfront, but on an ongoing basis. Other customers worked well with us in developing the interface and design of their website but failed to muster the resources to produce useful, relevant and timely content, either for the initial site launch or on an ongoing basis, thus keeping their site fresh. These customers invariably suffered through poorer results in terms of both traffic and conversions.

To highlight this I decided to conduct an experiment with this blog.

Every site that DMS has been involved with in the last several years, including this blog, we have monitored and tracked the site’s traffic and rankings. For example, here is what happened to the www.rda.org.au site when we redeveloped and relaunched it, for Riding for Disabled Australia.

So approximately three months ago, I stopped producing content for this blog.

Now the blog is not the only piece of content on this site. There are numerous resources that clients are directed to and of course there’s my biography, but it is the weekly blog that I believed was responsible for the majority of the traffic generation. Not only because people see new content as important but search engines do too. If Google sees that a website is frequently being updated and added to, it will visit that site more frequently and increase the site’s relevance when searches are performed.

Unfortunately, to fool Google I had to but the pause button on for some months, so it would see a changed pattern of behaviour and adjust its actions accordingly. Here‘s what happened…

As you can see there has been a gradually decline over the last couple of months after a continuous rise in rankings, prior to that point.

Despite how busy we are in the office (aren’t we all?), I am now going to make concerted effort to make sure that new content is posted this blog on the usual weekly basis. Let’s watch and see what happens…