Is Your Website Working for You?
Many of our blogs discuss helpful suggestions for managing your employees, yourself, and recruiting. But what about the only employee in your office who is objective, highly functioning, proactive, and also nice to look at? Well, if you have not found that person yet, have a look in front of you. The internet and your website have the potential to be all of these things and more. However, just as any employee deserves development, you should also invest in your website to maximize performance and capability. If you’re ready to get your website in shape to be a lead generating machine, or invest in a new website, it’s important to review these 3 key features.
Google Analytics
I was once told you need a 3 step process for success:
- Outline your goals.
- Acquire the right tools.
- Have a map to get you there.
Google Analytics can help you do all of this except put the map in your hand. Before we begin to improve your website, we have to know what to improve. Google Analytics can provide extremely valuable insights into who is visiting your site, where they are coming from, and what they are finding most interesting. Simply from that information, we would know you need to stop targeting the same age group on the same platform you’ve been spending so much time on the past decade.
If you are involved, or even slightly interested in ecommerce capabilities for your website in the future, you need Google Analytics. Properly installed, it will be able to track conversions (purchases), website traffic to individual products, specific page load speed, and channel sourcing. If this is all a little overwhelming, or you or not sure if you even have this feature implemented or now, give us a call, we’d love to help.
To better illustrate how this was put to good use, here is an example from a site we have done: www.lynchconstruction.com. The client was interested in pursuing digital advertising, so we had a preliminary analytics review to help guide us on the best course of action. In our first meeting, we reviewed the top pages and content on his website, represented by website traffic tracked through Google Analytics. We were able to identify their top three projects, and top three categories that we then optimized and promoted across social media. This resulted in over a 200% increase in website traffic compared to a similar period in the previous year.
Lead Generation Tool
We have come across too many sites that are missing big opportunities to collect leads – easily. For example, if you have a white paper, infographic, brochure, guide, etc., why not ask for the users email address to obtain those materials? A major benefit of implementing this website feature is that you will be able to store this user’s contact information to either upsell more expensive products at a later date, add them to your blog list, send promotional discounts/event information, and much more. This is one of the easiest ways to make your website work for you.
If you are not open to asking for this information yet, there should be, at the very least, an option to opt in for future emails somewhere on your site. See here for an example of a recent website we completed: www.martinecosystems.com. Today, there are an abundance of tools and plugins that we can utilize to tie in your CRM and get things rolling. Don’t have a CRM, or not sure what to do next? Drop us a line and we will get in touch with you to sort things out.
SEO Foundation
Lastly, you can do all of the above, and still not see an increase in website traffic. That is, if you are not either promoting your website, or preparing it to earn organic traffic. Odds are, there is someone searing for the services you offer right now, but is your business going to show up as the solution, or is your competitors? We’re not talking about paid search here, or Google Adwords. We’re talking about pure, organic search engine results. If your website has a solid SEO foundation, it has a much better chance at displaying higher in search results. That’s free marketing. It’s one more way to make your website a smooth operating, lead generating machine.
So what is included in a well put together SEO foundation? Here’s a quick list that needs to be in place:
- Relevant keywords on each page and post
- Meta fields filled out on each picture.
- Clear, relevant URL titles in your snippets.
- Copywriting that relates with your keywords.
- SSL certification
So, is your new “employee” ready to work?
Ah, if only website design were like it was back in 1997, we’d have so much less to do. But in today’s competitive, over-crowded environment, your site has to be the “Belle-of-the-ball” to even get noticed. But with great responsibility, comes great power (yeah, I know I flipped the famous Spiderman phrase around some). I.e, your site has tremendously more potential than ever before to generate more leads conversions for your business. If you are missing any of these key features on your site, it’s not the end of the world, and we’re here to help! Give us a call or drop me a line at [email protected].
PS: If you actually care to see some old websites back in the 1990s, here’s a neat article that digs up some abandoned ones: http://bgr.com/2015/07/24/1990s-websites-abandoned-still-running/
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