The Chicken & The Egg problem
I used to charge for building a website by the page, and invariably I would have the odd customer ask me to only build 1,2 or 3 pages. They would say something like: “I only want to invest in a few pages for now, and when I see some traffic (i.e. increase in sales) then I will be prepared to invest more to build out the rest of my website.”
Well there is a big flaw in that thinking. In order to draw the right traffic (visitors & prospects) to a website, the website must have a bunch of relevant content, which usually equates to much more than a few pages! So hence the chicken and egg conundrum – do you wait for traffic to build out your website, or build out your website and hope the traffic will come?
The art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is moving away from tricking Google (and Bing, Yahoo) into finding your site and it is becoming more about Content Marketing. This means that for a website to have a chance to be found it must have both relevant content (to the searcher) and a large amount of content which both answers the questions the searcher has in mind and informs and directs them to take the next step.
Now, when building a website, I build a minimum of 6 pages and usually include and encourage a blog section – where I ask the customer to publish a fresh new article, at minimum – monthly. The search engines love websites that continually update and publish fresh new content and the more content you have on your website, the more traffic you will attract.