How important is your company's website to its bottom line? It's no secret, we know that it's important, but how important? As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Improve the rate in which you convert visitors to customers on your site and improve your bottom line.
Whether you're selling product, generating sales leads, publishing a newsletter or just a brochure, there is little argument that your future customers will use your website at some point. Often their first impression of your company will be made based on a visit to your website in the very early stages of their purchasing cycle, whilst they gather information, determine their requirements and start to make a decision.
That moment when your future customer arrives at your website is make or break. One false move, one disappointment, or if you fail to clearly communicate your offer and suddenly you're no longer on the short list. Further, you must earn the right to turn that visitor into a customer one click at a time.
So how does this help your business grow? It's simple; if you don't ensure that the first impression that your company makes is a good one and if you don't move that visitor forward in their decision to purchase from your company, then you have left both business and money on the table.
Test everything
The key to making improvements in your advertising and website that positively impact, is testing. Almost every element on your website and in your online advertising can be tested and evaluated. Testing takes the guesswork out of implementing change.
I am often asked questions such as "will ... work on our site" or "what should I do about ...". To these questions I almost universally answer, perhaps, but to be sure we need to test.
It is only by devising and implementing a structured test that we can reliably measure, that we can begin to understand what changes have a positive effect and those that don't. Each company and website is unique and what works for one may not work for another. The only magic formula is test, test, test and revise.
There are a variety of tools and techniques used to test websites and advertising. My favorites are ClickTracks and Google Analytics. However in my experience most users of web analytics tools such as these are limiting their use to just finding out how many visitors their site gets and what pages that they access. By not fully utilising the potential of these tools to test your website and advertising, you are wasting a significant opportunity.
By combining these tools with developing formal business goals for your website and a structured testing framework, you can achieve positive results quickly and efficiently.
So how big an impact can testing have on your bottom line?
Lets assume that your website currently attracts 1000 visitors a month and uses articles and whitepapers to generate sales leads that are then followed up by your sales team. 500 of these visitors stay for a little while, 200 of them register on the site and 20 of them become customers. A small improvement in the number of people that complete the registration or contact forms will result in big improvements in the number of customers.
If your testing resulted in changes that increased the number of registrations by 25% you would have 50 more customer. Even better, you could do this with no increase in your marketing costs.
You can see that implementing a testing system is an investment that can reap substantial rewards.
Refining your advertisement
Testing enables you to refine your advertisement to attract qualified leads in greater numbers. It's done by rotating the ad with an alternative one. After a month, we might discover that the second ad generates more leads, use it to replace the first, and continue testing with a new alternative.
Over time, we work out which ad works best and stick with it for a while, until it might be wise to do more testing. Testing is an ongoing process.
Topping organic searches
‘Pay per click' advertising campaigns are a great way to generate immediate leads. But in the longer term, it's best if your website shows up at the top of organic keyword-based search results rather than just in the paid search results.
Getting to the top of organic listings, and staying there, is not easy. This is because competition is fierce for many keywords.
There are myriad different ways to go about it, and effectiveness varies depending on the search engine used. Google places a large emphasis on the number of quality sites that link to you. It's important with Yahoo too, but the actual content of your page is given more weight than in Google. This ranking bias applies even more with NineMSN.
The secret's out
The techniques for improving website rankings are no trade secret. Search for "search engine optimisation" (and "optimisation") on Google to learn about some of the things you should, and shouldn't, be doing. Over the longer term, it's a good idea to learn some of these techniques for yourself.