3 Ways to Improve Your Website Today
You should continually strive to improve your small business website in order to maximize the value of the site to your business. But where to start??
To that end, here are three relatively simple steps that you can take to make improvements to your website today:
1. Review Your Analytics
Have you checked your web analytics recently? Analytics stats reveal an amazing collection of information about your prospective customers, including the number of unique visitors to your site, new visitors vs. repeat visitors, where visitors came from and how they navigate through your site, the leading online conversion funnels, and from which page visitors exit your site.
Analyze the data and then decide on at least one improvement to your website that you can make to grow your business. For example, if you notice a large number of visitors exiting your site from the same page, test different adjustments to the page to compel them to stay on your site longer or to make a purchase.
2. Ask Your Customers a Question
Add a new question to your website today, either in the form of a poll, survey, contest or blog entry. Or simply request suggestions for improving the site. Solicit feedback from your customers, and leverage the insights to grow your business.
For example, ask them about potential new products/services that you are considering, or ask them about challenges that they are experiencing (that you can potentially solve).
3. Analyze the Competition
Check out three competitor sites today. Put yourself in the shoes of the prospective customer. What do you like about their sites? What do you not like? Do the sites compel you to contact the company or to make a purchase? Are they effective in differentiating their business and their offerings? Identify at least one way to make your site more competitive with these sites, either by finding a gap in the market that other firms are ignoring or by learning more effective ways to make your site customer-friendly.
For example, if you sell technology support services, perhaps there is a gap in the marketplace addressing the needs of women entrepreneurs and small business owners. This might be an area for you to target in gaining expertise, and you can start by making a special offer to this audience segment on your website today.
January 27th, 2009 at 10:38 am
4. Improve your SEO techniques
January 27th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Great tips, reviewing and monitoring your analytics is one of the best ways to improve your site and increase your bottom line.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
good ideas. I agree. Business promoting is never something you do once and you are done. It falls into the “i have to constantly work on it” category and website maintenance is very important. You gotta keep up with things to keep a business moving. Thanks for the ideas.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I agree analytics are a great (but not perfect) way to judge what is and what isn’t working. What is your favorite analytics tool? Google Analytics?
Another thing people forget about when building websites is that you need to have enough money in your budget to cover the (most likely) changes, additions, subtractions, and other fun stuff you will need to do.
Don’t end up on the street begging for HTML
-David
January 29th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Great tips Tom!
Word of warning though watching the stats can get addictive and you may find yourself spending more time watching and analyzing your stats than you are putting up quality content or connecting with your potential customers.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:14 am
Couldn’t agree with you more Tom, we started using GA to figure out/resolve our huge bounce rates on GA.
We also started using something new called mixpanel (http://www.mixpanel.com) which is cool because we track the actions of our users as well.
January 30th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Thanks for your comments, everyone!!
Click and Inc - Thanks. I agree that website maintenance is critical as an ongoing business effort. That is how you will maximize the results of your small business website investment. The market is too competitive these days not to keep on top of your website. The reality, though, is that many small business owners have a “set it and forget it” attitude towards their site. So this blog entry was really meant to give these types of individuals an easy way to get started — an easy way to make simple improvements to their sites. Hopefully this would translate into repeatable actions on their part.
January 30th, 2009 at 8:09 am
David, I like Google Analytics. That’s what is used on the WebsiteMarketingNOW.com site. There are other good options, such as ClickTracks (now part of Lyris/HQ), but it’s really incredible how much value Google Analytics can provide without any cost to one’s business.
Richard, thanks. Mixpanel looks very cool and useful. Essentially, whatever helps the small business owner understand what’s going on with his/her website and leads to insights for improving the site, then I think it’s highly valuable.
January 31st, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Great article, I am finding so much information-Thanks
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:30 pm
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April 3rd, 2009 at 11:39 am
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April 3rd, 2009 at 11:41 am
[...] should always’ be working to improve your business’ website, this will maximize the value of the site to your [...]
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Thanks my website is very new and I found this helpful:)