Does updating your sales page lead to more sales?

I read somewhere on the Internet that Google likes it when you do frequent updates to your webpage.

All things being equal, if there are two sites that are ranked pretty similar, the site that gets more frequent updates will show up higher in the Google search engine ranking pages.

So, Neil Patel hires a few people who just go through his older posts and updates a sentence or paragraph on a regular basis.

So, I embarked on a journey where I had a few people update my older content pieces. Sometimes they only adjust a few sentences and sometimes they rewrote entire paragraphs or sections.

That one thing grew my search traffic to 2,199,658 visitors over the last 31 days

Neil Patel, Declining Google Traffic

I thought I would try this.

I have a website where I do a product review for merchant. I use affiliate links on that webpage and when people click through the links and buy something from the merchant, I get a finder’s commission.

I wasn’t really watching where this page ranked in terms of keywords. But I have noticed this year that sometimes the affiliate sales would slow down on this page, and if I went to the page and updated it and added some new information, then I noticed that the sales would come back.

So, in May, I decided to do something new – which was to see if updating this sales page every day for 30 days would make a difference.

In terms of sales, it’s May 20, 2019 right now and I have made approximately $1320 in commissions from this experiment. In comparison, in March 2019 when I would update this webpage about once a week, I only made $1099 over the entire month.

So, updating the page regularly, I assume means that this page ranks a little higher in Google, which gets more traffic, which sends more people to the merchant using my affiliate links, which results in more sales.

So, I thought I would look at SEMrush to see if I could find some data that would support this theory.

This is a screenshot of some keywords that I think leads organic traffic to my website. I am using the “estimated traffic” option which considers the average position of these keywords and SEMrush’s estimate of how much volume of traffic there is for that keyword.

So, if we look at this screenshot, we can see little red diamonds that represent notes that I’ve added where I’ve updated the sales page. The G represents a Google algorithm update.

In March, we can see the traffic is pretty stable and then for some reason it goes up around March 18 and March 20. And then in April the traffic sort of sags a little bit, and then in May once I start using the strategy of updating the page regularly, the traffic seems to be a little bit higher but there is an odd drop on May 15.

So… I think the strategy is working?

I know that sales are up. I’m not entirely sure I see that this theory of updating the page results in a spike or increase in traffic, based on the SEMrush data. Of course SEMrush data is just an estimate – they have little bots that crawl the Internet and try to simulate what the Google bots see.

I could try to see from my Google analytics data to see if there is an increase in traffic right after I update the sales page.

I could dig a little bit deeper from Google analytics and Google search console and SEMrush data to see what keywords are actually driving people to the sales page.

We see that on Wednesday, May 1, when I make a blog post update, there is an increase in traffic, but later on the visibility doesn’t change that much more.

The experiment continues.