Your website can help you stand out from competitors, and give you additional business. Here’s a brief, basic and easy guide to inexpensive ways to improve performance of your existing site, in five steps. I’m expecting that you are an owner-manager of a small or medium sized business – but the advice should still be slightly helpful for anyone else starting to make their web site generate more business.
Measurement
If you don’t have website statistics now, ask your website management company, or your staff, to install the free “Google Analytics†package. There are many free packages and you may already have one, but a big advantage of Google Analytics is that it integrates well with Google’s advertising systems and reasonably well with many other advertising systems.
Make sure to ask that “error pages” – the “404 page” and any “500 pages” – also have the Analytics code on them. You should investigate and repair your website urgently, or your advertising, if large numbers of visitors reach these dead and useless pages.
A big weakness of Google Analytics is that it doesn’t do quite the right things, until it has been configured. Configuring it can be difficult for beginners – so here’s a good book with detailed configuration guidance, for technically oriented staff – Brian Clifton’s “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics“
As a minimum, you should ask for Google Analytics “profiles” that give you “Error Pages”, “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”, with “filters” that eliminate traffic from your own staff, and ignore traffic on any sites that have stolen your web pages without changing the Analytics code.
If you expect to use AdWords or other paid sources of traffic, you should have each of those paid sources of visitors broken into at least two separate profiles for each – for example “AdWords Visitors – New” and “AdWords Visitors – Returning”.
You can also ask your staff for reports to be automatically emailed to you weekly, so you don’t have to login and work out how to get what you want. There’s also a free iGoogle Analytics “plugin” so you can have stats on your Google Home Page – if you use that.
Understanding Visitors and Your Site
You should be able to answer the following questions. If not, you or your staff probably need to develop an understanding of how your website and your analytics works.
- How many people visit your site? Per day, per week and per month? And when, during the day, do they visit?
- How do new users find your site – are they coming from directories or from search engines or other sites?
- What search queries are visitors asking the search engines?
- Are visitors bouncing – leaving the site as soon as they arrive – in large numbers?
- How long do visitors stay on the site?
- What are the most and least popular pages with users – the ones most and least visited and the ones that users stay on longest and shortest? Is it what you expected?
You should be getting most new visitors from search engines – is that happening?
You probably should be getting return visits from customers – are you getting returning visitors?
If the pages for your best products and services aren’t getting visitor attention – why not?
See if you can improve your performance, by making changes and watching the statistics.
Customer Engagement
Think about the searches that prospective customers should be using to find your business. When you talk to them directly, what do they ask you? Not in your professional jargon, but with their use of language?
Now go to the “AdWords keyword ideas†tool. Put in your user’s important phrases and ask for suggestions. These are usually words and phrases that your site should be using and may even be used as the names or titles of web pages on your site. If you use language differently from your likely clients, you are less likely to attract them to your site and keep them engaged with your offers.
When you have a conversation with a client, lead or prospect, think about whether your website clearly describes the same things in the same way. If your website message is different from what you tell people, try to make the web site reflect what you are doing and saying.
If someone lands on the web page for a product or service, without going through the home page, would they know what you are offering and how to get hold of you? If you have a Unique Selling Point on the website – is it only shown on the home page? People who use search typically jump deep into your website, and will miss messages that appear only on the home page. So if you offer free shipping, or a free first order, or whatever it is – make sure that offer is visible on all likely landing pages.
Make sure that you have a call to action on each solution page, with prominent contact information. We’ve come across a surprising number of sites without phone numbers, inquiry forms or addresses… At the point when visitors should have decided they need to talk with you or place an order – make sure that they can do so. A rough rule is that “users will do what you ask them to” – so ask them to buy.
Before you make changes to the web site, here’s one more review step… does your website tell customers about you, or do you talk about them and their problems? Your website should demonstrate that your first priority is solving your customer’s problems. A swirling-in logo of your company, or the letters of the company name coalescing from a cloud, may look pretty neat, but does it answer a prospects’ first question – “do these guys have anything that solves my problem?” Focus on what your prospects need to know to become clients, and don’t delude yourself that they want to sit through the same 40 second monologue from you at the start of each visit, going on about how great your business is… They won’t like it. Really.
Get to the point quickly, and describe the problems that your customers used to have, and what you do to fix them. If you solve several problems, offer one web page for each, and use the home page to reference the different solutions. Each solution page should link to related pages, so if visitors aren’t in the right place, they can easily find where they should be.
Being Found – Search Engines and Other Visitor Sources
There are two main ways to appear in search engines. For the main search results, you use “Search Engine Optimisationâ€. Do read free advice from major search engines about selecting a SEO business before you pay for services.
Paid search advertising is the alternative. Smaller businesses shouldn’t just pick the market leader, Google AdWords, but consider the smaller players, MSN AdCenter and Yahoo!Search Marketing. There’s usually less competition, and the smaller audience doesn’t make much difference to the volume of visitors when the budget is small. They also attract slightly different audiences – so failure on one of them doesn’t mean they’ll all fail.
The AdWords Help Experts blog has a video showing how to set up advertising on Google AdWords. Do *NOT* use Google’s “Starter Edition” – it is poorly designed for new advertisers. Exercise great care – Google does not help you to control costs and improve ROI – their eye is definitely on their revenue, not yours. Do not expect to carry to AdWords, the same trust that you have in Google’s search engine, or you will lose money.
SEO is slower to return results, but often at a lower cost. If your website is pure Flash, gaining visitors through SEO will be harder and more expensive. Paid search advertising is faster, and it is easier to identify the return on your investment. We recommend that if you can, use Paid Search first, to quickly find which keywords & pages work, and then use SEO to target them.
You can also appear in business listings, such as Google Maps. If you sell products, you can list them, for free, with Google Product Search. You may have images and pictures that interest people, and you can get listed for those. You may make videos and publicise those for Video search. There are planty of ways for a little imagination and creativity to get your your business noticed.
- Qype – expanding worldwide, offers reviews of local resources and interaction with local and interested members of the community. See the Merjis listing showing that we offer internet marketing in Bedford. Accepts adverts, too.
- Gumtree – classified listing directory, accepts adverts
- Craigslist – massively popular classifieds
- eBay Stores – if you have products to sell, eBay has buyers.
- Yahoo Directory – paid listing, human moderated, the original large scale internet directory
- Open Directory Project – free listing, human moderated and a contributor to the Google Directory.
- LinkedIn – link to professional colleagues – see my profile for example
- Twitter – status feeds for customers, personal conversations, all sorts, Twitter is flexible
- MySpace
Do *NOT* pay for “Search Engine Submission” tools – if your site is properly linked to the rest of the web using the services and sites that I’ve given you, the major search engines will find you anyway. Do *NOT* list your site on free and unmoderated directory.
Internal Response
Leads received from the website are often left in email inboxes for a few days. Web leads are as urgent as a phone call. Make sure you and your staff respond promptly.
Finally, you probably have news about your business sector. Can you write it up, even if in only a few short sentences? A business blog with short, or even long articles like this one, can provide a way to communicate with new leads to show them how you help your clients, and it helps your SEO efforts. There’s lots of free blogging software that you could host on your own site, or you can use one of the public blogging services.
About Us
The author, Jeremy Chatfield, is a Google-recognised Top Contributor in the AdWords Help Forum and manages the AdWords Help Experts blog; he is a Google AdWords Qualified Individual. Merjis, in Bedford i-Lab (+44 1234 834760), helps clients to improve their web site performance.
Material Disclosures
The link to the Google Analytics book above is an “affiliate” link. If you click and buy, we may make a small amount of money. It’s a demonstration of another common technique for attracting visitors (using “affiliate programs”) and may be a way for you to additionally monetise your site.
None of the other links are affiliate links, even when an affiliate program exists for that organisation.
This article is an expanded version of an advertorial in our local business newspapers, “Business to Business” and “Business MK“.
AdWordsPro Sarah wrote,
This looks really great Jeremy. Would you like me to link to it from the forum? I know our users there can probably use all the help they can get….
Link | February 28th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Jeremy Chatfield wrote,
Hi AWP.Sarah – yes, please. Thanks!
Link | February 28th, 2009 at 1:35 am