How Small Businesses Are Missing Huge Web Traffic Opportunities

Is your company’s Website updated more than once a week? Is it integrated with social media tools like Facebook and Twiter?

These may seem like rather basic, obvious matters at this point, but a surprising number of small businesses are not updating their sites frequently or utilizing social media as much as they could be. The cost? Lots of traffic.

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Fifty-four percent of small businesses update their sites less than less than once a month, according to a study of SMB Website usage released by SiteKreator, a drag-and-drop site creation tool for businesses.

The small number of sites that were updated more than five times per month saw 300% more traffic than sites updated less frequently. As we’ve discussed previously, maintaining a solid company blog can go a long way toward driving traffic to your company’s Website.

Shockingly, 75% of businesses included in the study did not integrate social media directly into their Websites. Not surprisingly, those that did saw 400% more unique visitors. Facebook turned out to be a much bigger traffic driver than Twitter, which makes sense considering Facebook’s larger user base and the fact that using Twitter may not make sense for all types of businesses.

The study is based on a sample of 5,000 business Websites hosted on SiteKreator, out of a total of approximately 100,000 using the platform. They used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to hire people to review each site. At least two different people reviewed each site independently.

This sample may or may not be statistically representative of business Websites in general, but the results are interesting nonetheless.

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