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I figured the best way to start providing useful information to the small business owner or department head responsible for a corporate web presence would be to cover some of the basics of online marketing today…the points below make up the high level questions I ask when I meet a client for the first time and am trying to get an understanding as to the level of sophistication of their website and online marketing efforts…
Do you know what users are doing on your website? Analytics is free; there are no excuses anymore for not knowing what’s happening on your website. Since Google bought Urchin and set it free as Google Analytics, anyone with a website can now get a fairly advanced level of understanding as to where site visitors come from, what they do when they get there, where they leave, and a whole lot more. If you don’t have analytics on your site yet, check out these great Google Analytics blogs to understand some of the more detailed ins and outs of how to use GA. If you would like help installing and customizing Google Analytics on your site we would be happy to help. Yes it tracks commerce revenue by campaign too!
Is ranking well in search engines important? It is important that your customers are able to find your site on the major search engines! It kills me when I speak with small business owners who say things like “I don’t really care about showing up in Google because I’ll send people to my site from my magazine ad and it’s on my business card too.” If you are looking to get more customers for your product or service, there is no larger market than the major search engines. Ignoring it could be a MASSIVE mistake.
Do people know what they are supposed to do on your site after you get them there? Have a call to action on your site. Seth Godin’s book “The Big Red Fez” puts forth the idea that every single page of your site needs to have JUST ONE goal. If you are trying to get leads, the contact form or the phone call is the goal of every page. If you are selling products online, getting that checkout process underway is the goal, along with maybe getting customers to add that one additional item to their cart on the way out the door. If you have an advertising supported content site, the goal is keeping them on the site and getting more page views. Whatever it is, make it painfully clear to site users what they are supposed to do next.
Do you have goals for your site? Yes, this is the part where I start to sound like a life coach, thus indicating that it’s time to wrap this posting, but having goals for your website is critical! How can you measure success unless you have a very well defined understanding of what success is? Make the goals for your site realistic and give them a time frame. “I need the site to sell an average of 20 widgets a month by the end of the year.” “I want to increase the number of leads I get through my website by 20% this quarter.” A metric and a time frame. That’s all you need!