Business owners are failing to update their websites with anything like the frequency that is required. Indeed, many of them aren’t even seeing web updating as an important part of their day, instead relegating it to a moment or two spare in the evenings. Those are the findings of a survey from Streamline, the web hosting company which discovered that only one in every ten websites are being updated on a daily basis. This backs up similar studies which show that most websites rarely get updated and less than 2% of business websites are updated more than once a day. Websites which do get regular content added appear to do so on average around only three times a month.

But a study by HubSpot shows that this is not enough. Companies which add content frequently are much more likely to generate sales leads than those which only do so occasionally. Indeed, of those businesses in their study which update their websites more than once a day 100% of them get new business leads as a result of their website. But for companies that only update their website monthly, that falls to a mere 38%. Only slightly more than half of companies who add fresh content to their website weekly generate business from their sites according to the research.

{fusionchart id=”8″ Blog Frequency}

The Streamline study added another twist to this issue. They found that what people actually call an update is nothing more than a technical tweak or two. In other words, people are “updating” their website but NOT actually adding any fresh content. And that means it is as good as useless in terms of business generation – because the HubSpot data reflects only fresh content. Even adding fresh content once a week is much less likely to generate business than adding new content several times a day.

The issue for many business owners appears to be time. According to Streamline almost a quarter of companies relegate website updating to “late evenings”, which means it is clearly not seen as a priority. Another aspect of their survey confirms the low priority with which business owners view the Internet – one in three are not even checking any kind of statistics, so they have no idea about visitor numbers or what kind of content is working.

The research from Streamline and the data from HubSpot both say the same thing – the vast majority of business owners fail to understand the central importance of the Internet in generating new business. It seems that most people consider all they need to do is build a site and then, er, wait…and wait…and wait…! Guess what? Nothing happens, they get no business and they say “but you have to have a website don’t you?”.

Here is a simple rule which applies to all successful businesses online:

Update your website with fresh content every day.

That’s it. That’s all you need to do to ensure you generate new business. In other words, business owners need to make website activity central to their business, rather than as a late evening afterthought.