It is very important to measure the effectiveness of your website, since it is the identity of your business. Your website is an important marketing and sales tool, and sometimes poor sales can be greatly attributed to a website. The metrics are the number of hits on the website, website ranking on search engines, number of repeat visitors and customer conversion ratio.
There is no de facto method to boost the traffic with the swing of a magic wand, but small techniques that help you make the most of your website, do come in handy.
So, if you are looking to relaunch your website design to make it relevant for your business, here are 8 things to consider:
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1. Analyse the old website
Poor web design can affect sales and conversions. Does your web design look outdated? Are there complaints about user experiences? No matter what the size of your company, you must take a strategic look at your existing website and be able to gauge what isn’t working, what will work and what goals you wish to achieve.
Consider what needs change. Is it just a headline on the home page, over all imagery, template layout, navigation bar design or form layouts? Make a list of all those items that can make positive changes and thereby help maximize conversions.
2. Redefine your Target Audience
It is highly likely that your target audience has moved on. Identify your target audience, to whom the website speaks to. It is a good idea to visualise an ideal buyer or buyers for your various products and services. The need is to assume him (or her) as a fictionalized representation of your ideal customer, to whom the website communication and campaigns are aimed to attract.
Understanding their online behaviour during various stages of considering to buy your product or service will help to refine the marketing strategy. The website will also cater to his needs with customised content that attracts different ideal buyers with design and form that can drive more hits and conversions.
3. Create a Mobile Responsive Site
With more than 60% of online users browsing with their mobile phones and tabs, thanks to falling bandwidth charges, your website, no doubt, must be mobile responsive. The other factors to consider while designing the website is simplistic in design, attractive images, apt and striking content, relevant videos and quick action buttons to call / mail / download.
The home page must develop a trust with the Ideal Customer who lands up on the website. If you have more than one ideal customer, the home page may have highlighted banners to address them so that they will feel comfortable to explore further.
4. Have an Integrated Blog
While your website is aimed to talk about your products and services, which is more of a known ‘sales pitch’, a blog provides an expression to connect with your ideal customers. Using the blog to talk about the various issues and options during the buying cycle of your ideal customer will usually make him comfortable.
There is absolutely no need to hard sell your products and services here. The blog must be sensitive to their situation and can highlight how others in the same situation has resolved their problems using your products and services. A blog will invite opinions from all corners of the internet. It will be a medium of knowing your audience’s interests. These small yet powerful areas are ones that drive popularity to your business.
Having an integrated blog also builds the number of indexed pages, thus increasing the domain authority of your website offering SEO benefits, but the most important of them all is that it keeps your audience engaged within your website.
5. Don’t take SEO for granted
It’s a proven fact that traffic created from search engine results is profitable, and conversion rate is much higher. With insight into the ideal customers and their online behaviour especially on search engines, you can attune your website to rank higher for those keywords. A simple thing to remember is, the website which is relevant for a user’s search keyword is optimised by the search engines. The more we talk about the ideal customer’s search keyword, our chances of optimisation increases.
Keep track of major SEO metrics such as keyword performance, traffic from organic search, conversion rates from organic search and unique search terms. There are loads of free and paid tools available that do these things for your website. Make sure you set up these benchmark metrics and analyze website performance in terms of keywords to customize the content based on them. This is important to increase relevant traffic to the website.
6. Go Social
Social media is inevitable in today’s world and your online visibility also includes a social media presence. The choice of social media totally depends on your customer’s online social behaviour. However, a Facebook page and a Twitter handle for B2C, a LinkedIn page for B2B will do most of the job.
Use such colors, fonts, and imagery that reflect your brand identity and personality. Always write in a consistent voice so your audience recognizes and looks forward to your social media content consistently and doesn’t get confused. Craft such campaigns that resonate with your target audience and their evolving needs.
7. The Art of Launching a Landing Page
Enough has been talked about maintaining a website, but the most crucial part of it all is noteworthy landing pages. Yes, not all the users need to land up on the home page. Landing Pages can be for designed for ideal customers / different products / different campaigns. It is that magic page that is supposed to catch the attention of your audience; it is the first point of contact with the website.
Ideally, it should be of value to the customer like a free trial of a product, or an introductory offer and so on. According to reports the number of leads is directly proportional to the number of landing pages. Basically more landing pages means more conversion opportunities.
If you are own a retail business and would like to know more building an effective website read 4 Secrets of Success for Launching “The Best” eCommerce website.
8. Do The Analysis
As a marketing tool, the performance of the website must be tracked to ensure ROI (Return on Investment). While the number of leads generated is an easy and direct measure, it doesn’t always help to suggest areas to improve the website performance. So, having metrics like ranking for keywords, number of unique visitors from SEO / Social Media, number of visitors to landing pages / blogs with conversion rates, can provide insights into areas of improvements on your website.
There are loads of analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which gives good insights on your website performance. With the data collected on periodical basis, track your website’s performance, fix the issues now and then. Make changes to your website, one at a time and monitor the results. If you still feel that your website is under performing don’t hesitate to get an expert’s opinion.
Your website can be converted as a competitive tool for marketing, as well as a research tool to keep gauging changing the needs of your customers. While it may take some time to manage it effectively, the whole process is fun when it is integrated with your business and you start seeing results.
You can always trust the professional guidance and support from Pixel Studios to bring a powerful online presence for your business.
Originally published May 12, 2016 02:18:00 PM, updated May 29 2020
