How to Get More Results from Your Website?
In another article, we covered how businesses can increase sales and how to implement web hub promotion.
We will now focus on getting more results from our website.
Right from the start, we need to realize that good results are dependent upon the goals of the firm. Therefore more results are defined as more fully meeting the firm’s website goals.
When setting the firm’s website goals, we first need to see what the site can do for our business?
What can the website do for us?
The two basic things that a website can do for us are to boost sales and to save costs.
By boosting sales we mean to promote, to inform, to move the sales cycle forward, or to actually make the sale.
We can also save costs by having our website do our work for us; in areas of customer inquires, entering orders, and customer support.
For example, a brochure downloaded from our website is a brochure that does not need to be mailed to the customer, one less brochure to be printed, and it may mean one less phone call to take.
Setting Website Goals
With our focus on sales and cost savings, we can now set appropriate website goals. Our goals will depend upon our particular situation. If we need a lot more sales and support is not much of an issue, then it is clear that we will need a revenue boosting website.
Design the Website by Merging Your Target Market’s Needs with Your Own Goals
We make products and offer services, not for ourselves, but rather for our customers. In fact, we do not even need to like the products that we make; as long as our customers like them.
The website is no different. The website needs to appeal to our customers and to fulfil their needs.
If we totally focus our website’s design efforts on the needs and preferences of our target market, then we will probably not achieve the firm’s goals. On the other hand, if we blatantly pursue our firm’s goals, then our target market may not be interested in using our site.
The challenge is to merge our goals with the needs of our target market. The successful, high performing website is a mix of the needs of the two groups.
Boosting Sales or Achieving More Results
Not all business sites are focused on generating more sales; some want other results. But in either case, we still use the same formula: increase traffic and increase conversion rate.
The number of visitors to our site is the traffic. But not all traffic does what we want them to do. So we measure the number of sales made, or appropriate action taken, from those visitors.
Now if we divide the number of visitors by the number of sales/actions, we get the conversion rate.
It then becomes clear that boosting results is a matter of increasing web traffic and improving our conversion rate.
Generating More Traffic to Our Site
We need to ensure that our target market uses our site. Generating web traffic can be viewed as three separate tasks: traditional promotion, search engine optimization, and web-marketing.
1. Traditional Promotion is advertising, public relations, and all the other ways to promote outside of the Internet. This also includes self-promotion: including our website address on company literature, letterheads, and sales aids.
2. Search engine optimization is a two part process:
a. On-page optimization is where we match search engine keywords with our site. We determine what search terms people will be using to identify our site and ensure that these keywords are well placed so that the search engine will rank our page high.
b. Off-page optimization is a process of getting higher ranks with web links, articles, and other processes that will make the importance of our website higher with the search engine firms like Google.
3. Web Marketing is the task of promoting our website on the Internet.
Boosting Our Conversion Rate
Boosting conversion rates is a process of making our website more in-tune with the visitor, more persuasive, easier to use, and so on.
Now that the visitor has arrived at our site, do we have the right image, the right message, and the best organization?
We start by letting the web designer create the site. The designer is guided by web studies, guidelines, and best practices. But every site is different, and this approach may not be good enough.
If the designer's site is not good enough, then the next step is testing. Creating different sites with variations on text, images, and organization; and then testing how well they do on conversion rates.