4 Important Website Metrics You Should Be Measuring

1. Referrers – What this basically tells you is how people are making their way to your website. Are they Googling one of your keywords? Are they clicking on an ad you’ve placed on another site? Did they find your website URL through your Facebook or Twitter profile? The more you understand what is driving the most traffic to your site, the better you can hone your marketing and focus your budget.
2. Keywords – One of the greatest things about Google Analytics is that you can actually analyze which keywords are getting the most attention on your site. You can use this information to further capitalize on what’s working by using these words or phrases more in your content and future blog posts, or you can gain perspective on words that may not be generating as much traffic as you’d like and try to beef up that number. The goal is to optimize your keywords so that they accurately reflect what your business is and how it works. (If you need help defining your keywords, try using Google’s keyword tool.)
3. Conversions – What is the ultimate goal of your website? Is it to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter, or make a purchase? Your conversion rate tells you how many people that are coming to your website are completing whatever this goal is. Analyzing your conversions can give you insight into the behavior of your web visitors prior to conversion, so that you can understand what is motivating them and better focus your marketing efforts.
4. Bounce Rate – The bounce rate reveals the percentage of visitors that leave your website after viewing just one page. The lower this number, the better. If your bounce rate is high, this typically means that your website is not effectively engaging visitors and you may need to work on improving your content and/or design to reduce this rate.

Labels: small business tips, website optimization

7 Tips to Improve Your Website

Our most recent post about business websites covered 6 ways to get more web traffic. Hopefully if you’ve followed a few of those tips you’ve been able to see some results and get more visitors to your site. But that isn’t the be all and end all. Just like anything in business, a website should be flexible enough to evolve and grow to meet changing needs. You should always be looking for ways to improve and enhance your business website if you want to truly get the most out of it. Here are 7 tips that will help you make your current website even better.

1. Identify the problems – Look at your site objectively. Be honest - if you were a visitor, would you stay on that website? This will help you to identify possible problems so they can be addressed. For instance, maybe the color of the font is making it hard to read, or maybe there are too many graphics so it appears cluttered. Fix what’s wrong so you don’t turn visitors (a.k.a. potential new clients) away.
2. Simplify – You don’t need a million pictures or fancy graphics on your business website. These things could be drastically slowing down the time it takes for your pages to load (and annoying web visitors). Keep only the information you need and that you feel is relevant to get your message across and get rid of the rest.
3. Consider a makeover – If your website has been the same for years, it might be time for a facelift. Consult with a web design company to see what they can do to spruce up your existing page and make it look more modern and fresh.
4. Keep it up to date – Take a look through your “static” or informational pages, like your “About Us” page and make sure all of the content is up to date and reflects any changes that you may have made to your company. For instance, if you’ve been in business for 7 years but your “About Us” reflects only 3 years, that looks bad for your company.
5. Add new content – If you really want to encourage people to return to your website and recommend it to others, you’ll have to provide them with something new and relevant to look forward to. Consider adding a section for the latest news or stories about your industry or niche that will keep your readers interested, informed and coming back for more.
6. Update your blog – For your blog to serve its purpose, you absolutely must make it a priority. Add posts at least once a week and choose topics that are interesting so that they engage your audience. As a bonus, blogs that are regularly updated do very well in the search engines, so it may also help to get your business found on the web.
7. Make your contact info visible – Believe it or not, I’ve come across countless business websites where I had to search through pages and pages just to find their phone number. It’s incredibly frustrating. Make sure your contact information, including phone number and email address, are easy to find to encourage your visitors to reach out to you. Better yet, consider adding a “live chat” feature to give your visitors instant gratification.

These simple things should help you optimize your website and keep it fresh so that not only will you encourage visitors to come to your site, but you’ll have a much better chance of keeping them there.

Labels: small business tips, website optimization