Your web site may be showing its age. A site that looked great 5 years ago can look pretty dated now. And it is quite likely not taking advantage of current tools for maintenance and search engine optimization. But when your web site is “good enough,” you can understandably be reluctant to make any big change.

The expense, the hassle of planning it and working with a developer…you’d rather just be running your business. So why do it? I explain the value below.

I approached Ramsey Group in March to suggest that they upgrade their site to a more current aesthetic, and install WordPress so they could make their own updates. We agreed that the objective was to enhance a visitor’s overall experience, make products and categories easier to browse, and to place more content on the homepage in order to increase search engine ranking.

I am proud to report that it has truly paid off. Their site has always received a substantial amount of traffic, which has picked up slightly, but the bigger change has been time on site. This is a measurement of how long, on average, visitors spend on the site before moving on to somewhere else on the internet. Prior to the re-design, average time on site was just over 2 minutes. Immediately after the re-design, this score doubled to nearly 5 minutes and has held steady for several months.

Another metric which has improved since the re-design is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is a measurement of how many visitors to the site view a single page and then leave the site without viewing any more pages. There is no ideal bounce rate, as many different factors can affect it, but lower is better, and anywhere between 40%-60% is considered fairly typical. Ramsey Group’s bounce rate started out over 60% and is now in the mid-40′s.

Finally, Ramsey Group went from deep in Google’s results to 1st or 2nd page placement for more than 10 significant keyword phrases.

The picture we see with these metrics is that Ramsey Group’s site visitors are now much more engaged with the web site than they were before. When they land on the site, their attention is drawn in and they explore the information there. This is why you have a web site in the first place, so make sure it isn’t merely “good enough.”

BEFORE	AFTER