How do you know if your website is serving you well?

Reading Statistics
A good website traffic counter will provide you with useful statistics about your website traffic. There are questions you need answers to on a regular basis:

• Where are my visitors coming from?
• How long are they staying on the site?
• Are they coming back?
• What search engines are they using?
• What search phrases (keyword terms) are they using?
• What pages are they viewing?
• What products are they looking at?
• What page do they exit from the most?
• Where are my visitors located geographically?
• What types of visitors leave immediately?

When you know a lot about your visitors you can make smart decisions about what you should add or what you should take away from it. You will learn things about your target market that you didn’t know previously.

A car parts seller created a website in order to expand his customer base but he limited shipping to US addresses only. After reviewing his website statistics over a period of six months he realized that he was receiving a large amount of traffic from overseas locations. He did some research and decided to offer international shipping for a trial period. Sales increased nearly 20% over the next month. He never would have considered an international market if it were not for what he learned from his stats.

If your hosting company doesn’t provide a useful stats program you can incorporate Google Analytics into your website. This is a free service and the stats you generate are top notch.

Determining your Conversion Rate
Since every website has a purpose, there must be something that you want your visitor to do when they come to your site.

• Buy your Product
• Use your Services
• Hire you as a Coach or Consultant
• Join your Membership
• Sign up for your Mailing List
• Subscribe to your Podcast
• Enter your Contest

The percentage of your visitors who take the desired action is your conversion rate.

You have 1000 visitors in a month.
47 People Make a Purchase
47 divided by 1000
That is a .047 conversion rate – a little more than 4%.
(Not bad! 3% is considered about average for a product site.)

You have 500 visitors in a month to your newsletter opt in site.
149 Subscribe to your Newsletter
149 divided by 500
That’s a .298 conversion rate – 29%
(That’s great! A 30% conversion for an opt in ‘squeeze’ page is considered very good.)

When a website is new and doesn’t have a lot of steady traffic, it is difficult to determine how well it is really doing – but in general you want to see at least one purchase for every 100 visitors. If you’re not seeing this, you’ll want to evaluate and see if you can spot areas to improve.

Last Thoughts

As time goes by you’ll learn a lot about your target market. There may be items and services you offer that they have no interest in so you’ll decide to drop them from your inventory. If you’re smart, you’ll carry on a steady dialog with your list members so that you will know what they’re looking for that they haven’t found with you.

Your business website isn’t like a print brochure that you have 10,000 prints made of, it’s a living business tool that can grow and respond and adapt to your market’s needs.

Now that you’ve taken the time to give your website a check up you are equipped to continue taking its pulse and making certain that it is serving you and your business to its greatest ability.

What are you communicating?

Every page of your website has a reason for existence. It has something to communicate. It has a job to do. So what is that job?

If you sell products, can a customer tell from the first page what you sell? If not, you’re already in peril. The main page is for the customer. There should be a clear path to your products or services and immediately recognizable resources that they can explore to learn more about you and your business.

Let’s break all this down into chunks. What elements are important for your website?

Graphics
Your web graphics (if you are using any) are the first things that your visitors notice. Graphics should lend description to the site, not just decoration. A well designed header graphic tells customers a lot about your website.

There are hundreds of awesome free graphic sites, but don’t be too quick to use free graphics on your main page. You want to create an original memory in the mind of your potential customer. Potential clients rarely buy from a site the first time they visit unless they are extremely motivated. But if your site makes an impression on them, they will remember what you offer and go back when they have a need for what you offer.

When remembering your website, chances are they have a very visual memory of what your site looked like – so even if they don’t happen to remember your URL, they’ll scan the search engines for ‘that site’ that they were at before. If your site looks like a hundred other sites, they might not remember you later. So use graphics to make an impression on visitors.

It can be worth the expense to buy an original web set from a graphic artist who will not sell the same graphics to anyone else.

Graphics include photographs of your products.

If you do not own a quality camera, consider borrowing one from a friend or budget in a session with a good photographer. Product images must be crisp and clean and well organized. Take some time to position items attractively for every shot. Later when you’re preparing the images for the web, take the time to crop and size each item appropriately.

Perhaps the most important graphic of all will be your headshot.

If you’re running a business that keeps you in the background, a photograph isn’t crucial, but most times it is very beneficial to have a recent picture of the person they are doing business with. In fact, if you’re positioning yourself as a reliable source of expertise, you’ll probably use your photograph on the main page.

Do take some time with this. Don’t crop your wedding photo and don’t use something so tiny that you can barely be recognized. Select a facial expression that conveys what you want visitors to know about you. IE: You’re friendly, you’re professional; you are a complete goofball. Whatever your purpose is in doing business let it come through in your photo.

Headlines
Headlines are attention grabbing statements that pull a visitor in and encourage them to read the information provided on a website.

There are a few things that headlines should not include:

• Welcome messages or other greeting messages. (“Welcome to our Website” or “We’re so glad you found us.”)
• Obvious statements. (“You’ve reached the website of John Doe.”)
• Dull remarks about Products or Services. (“Check out our big selection!”)

Instead use headlines to engage your visitor in a conversation of sorts. A good headline has been written to speak directly to your target market.

• It may be posed in the form of a question that they can say yes to. (Would You Like Me To Show You How You Can Save Time With Your…” )
• It may make a statement that they will agree with. (“Pet Owners Want To Spend More Time Enjoying Their Pets And Less Time Cleaning Up After Them!”)
• Or it may be something that creates curiosity. (“Nine out of Ten Men Say This Is One Sure Fire Way To Capture And Keep Their Attention”)

Copy
The text on your website is your ‘copy’. Remember, your website is communicating with potential clients and customers in your place so the text on your main page needs to tell them everything that you would have told them yourself if you were meeting them in person for the first time.

It’s not that you want to create an encyclopedia on the first page – but do provide them with a clear way to learn more and find what they need.. There are several ways to do this.

• Create a ‘First Time Visitor’ page.
• Create a Frequently Asked Questions database.
• Offer a Help Desk System with clear directions for internet newcomers and existing customers.
• Offer a Testimonials page where you archive all of your customer comments.
• Create pages that describe your services and explain the purchase process.
• Use an appropriate shopping cart system for products that allows you to organize products into useful and easy to search categories.

Remember, every page has a purpose. As you evaluate the text on each page – first identify the roll of that page.

For instance, the ‘About Me’ page exists to tell your visitors more about you, show them that you are someone that they would like to work with and create a sense of familiarity and trust. With that in mind – you know you need to share more than just your marital status and city of origin. You’ll want to share your personal and professional interests and achievements and include anything else that furthers your potential relationship with clients.

Product and Services Descriptions
This is an area of web copy that is often overlooked by website owners. They rely too much on product images and fail to provide enough information about the product by text.

Look at each product and service that you offer and think of the questions and concerns that visitors may have about them and respond to them. Do not worry about being repetitive – more information is better than less.

Tell potential clients how they will be contacted about services and what kind of support they can expect. Anticipate their concerns and put their fears to rest.

Every time you get another email or telephone question about something a visitor could not find on the website – go and add the information in appropriate sections of the website. Eventually you will have a website that really does completely represent you in your absence.

Navigation
How is your site set up? Is everything centered right down the middle? Does your page run about six feet in height? You might not realize it but whatever you have displayed after the first couple of scrolls will probably never be seen. Do you have a smattering of images here, there and everywhere? It is very hard to know where and what to look for on a site like this. Most visitors will just give up and leave.

This is what you have to keep in mind: You know your website left, right and upside down. So unless you step outside your own perspective, you may assume that everyone else can navigate your site as well as you can. It would be a very good idea to invite someone who has never used your site before to visit and ask them to find the answers to a few common first time visitor questions.

For example:

• What kind of shipping options do you offer?
• What is your return policy?
• Do you offer telephone support?
• How long have you been in business?
• Can you help me with __________?

Choosing a Navigational Structure
There are lots of options for navigation on a website. Most commonly you see a navigation list on the left hand side of the website, though you will also see some sites with a horizontal navigation bar across the top of their site. The choice is yours but do choose just one – websites with navigation in more than one spot can be confusing for users.

To decide how to organize your website content, take some time and explore a few competitor’s websites and take note of what you like and do not like about how they have things put together.

If your site is going to grow over time you’ll want to make use of sub-directories (folders) in order to sort the content into easily accessed areas of the site. For example you might have a sub-directory for all of your articles, another for archived newsletters and another for product info. (This is not so much for your visitors as it is useful for you or whoever will be managing the website long term.)

In the next and final part of this report we will go over the ways you can tell if your website is working well or not.

One of the most important tools that you can put into action for your business is a well designed, carefully written and smartly organized website. So whether you are just now planning your first website – or you’re reading this in order to evaluate what you’ve been using up to now, our goal with this report is to help you give your website a complete check up.

To begin, let’s identify the role that a website plays in your business and look into how to make certain that it is fulfilling that role to the greatest extent possible. We’ll break the different key components of a successful website down and consider how they benefit you and your business as well as how they can be optimized to laser target your preferred customer base.

There is something that has to be said up front: For many small business owners, their first website has been or is being designed from dreams and visions they’ve treasured in their hearts for a long time.

Looking at it with a fresh perspective can be difficult or even a little painful. If you can understand this up front, it will be easier for you to work through your feelings on it. What’s most important for your long term business success is that you learn to look at your website from the consumer’s point of view instead of from your own.

Here’s an example:

Mark has been planning his break from corporate life for ten years. His dream of operating his own consulting business is finally coming true. He has been telling his wife and friends for years that he sees the new business as his ticket to freedom so he’s planning to build his business logo and website around a characterized ticket figure. He has envisioned this little cartoon character on every page of his site.

This character has huge personal meaning for him – but it has nothing to do with his consulting business and really isn’t at all appropriate for his target market. So someone has to tell Mark the hard truth – he needs to drop the character and pursue a more professional look for his website.

What does a website need to do?

Your website is a virtual storefront. It represents you and it represents your products and services. It speaks for you and if it has been put together right – it sells for you.

Of course, not every website has been designed to sell something, yet every website, every web page even, has a distinct purpose and should inspire a desired action in visitors.

What is YOUR website’s purpose?

Have you ever sat down and considered just what it is that you want your website to accomplish for you?

Will it sell a product?
A website that has been designed to sell a product has a pretty clear cut purpose.

• Present the products in the best light possible.
• Invite visitors to stay in touch with you through a mailing list.
• Answer all potential questions about the product itself.
• Provide details about shipping, returns and payment options.
• Provide a clear pathway to purchase.
• Make the sales process as simple for the buyer as technically possible.
• Thank the customer for their purchase.

Will it sell a service?
A website that has been designed to sell a service also has a clear purpose.

• Present the service in the best light possible.
• Invite visitors to stay in touch with you through a mailing list.
• Answer all potential questions about the service itself.
• Provide details about service delivery and payment options.
• Provide a clear pathway to purchase.
• Make the sales process as simple for the buyer as technically possible.
• Thank the customer for their purchase.

Will it provide useful content as its main purpose?
A content based site takes many forms but its main role is usually the delivery of high quality information. As the person who is providing the content, you usually have a goal in mind – there is something that you desire from those who come to consume your content. Therefore you want the website to:

• Deliver the content attractively.
• Invite visitors to stay in touch with you through a mailing list.
• Establish your reputation for providing good content.
• Promote affiliate links.
• Promote related products and services of your own.

Will it offer users a source of community?
Some websites are designed to be a hub of interaction and so it is expected to:

• Provide an attractive atmosphere for users.
• Provide compelling content.
• Invite visitors to become a member.
• Collect appropriate information.
• Provide a way for members to interact.

Your website may be a combination of any of the above.

You may offer both products and services and deliver useful content and provide a community. The question is do your visitors understand clearly what it is that you have to offer them?

Some large websites that have many different purposes could benefit from a breaking down and separating of it’s different sections into different sites – but that’s not always the case, it all depends on how well you are delivering your message and how well your visitors are responding to it.

In the next section we will discuss what needs to be communicated to your visitors and the most effective method of doing it.

Before you advertise you have to know who you want to advertise to. This means that you have a clear idea of who your target market is and you know why you are uniquely suited to serve them. If you struggle in this area it will pay to take time out now to nail it down.

If you have your target market all worked out, you’re ready for the next step.

Evaluating your website

Have you ever read a wonderful ad and been motivated to click through to check out their website, only to be disappointed by what you see when you get there?

It can be easy to devote all of your attention to the ad you place and forget to take a good look at the web pages that will get the desired traffic and decide if they are ready to perform for you.

• Is your website easy to navigate?
• Is there an attractive header graphic?
• Are your images clean and sharp?
• Is there sufficient info to let a visitor make an informed decision?
• Can you find contact info?
• Can you find shipping info?
• Can you find pricing info?
• Are there testimonials from satisfied customers?

When evaluating your individual web pages you need to know what you want. Every page has a purpose and you should be able to identify that purpose right away.

Optimally your website would confirm that targeted visitors have come to the right place for what they’re looking for and quickly ink the deal with a sale or contract of some kind. Statistics tell us that this optimum response happens at a rate of about 3-5% in the best of times – which leads to the need for a good back up offer – which is usually something designed to win the visitor’s contact info.

Always be able to answer two questions:

• What is this page created to do?
• What back up offer does it make?

What purpose does your home page have? If its a single page sales letter that is pretty easy: it exists to sell the product.

If you have a service based business, your home page purpose may be to communicate who you are and who you serve. Its purpose is to attract the perfect client and repel those who aren’t a good fit for you – and by attract, we mean that it should pull a good potential client to go deeper into your website to check out your service offerings, testimonials, etc.

Display Product Images.

If you run a web store, your main page exists to show off the most seasonally appropriate products and offer easy navigation and search functions to help visitors find what they are looking for.

Any of these main pages would benefit from having a back up offer of some kind, such as a free eCourse offer placed at the bottom of the page for the sales letter; a meaty tips list opt in on your service provider’s website and a special deal alerts newsletter for the web store.

Your main page is very important, but so is every other page on your site.

Identify each page’s purpose and see if some don’t really need to exist or if some could be condensed for simplicity. (For example: Do you really need separate pages for shipping, return and contact info?)

In many cases, the main page isn’t the appropriate choice for your advertising landing page – so before you start to craft your next ad, think about what you want to advertise and what page of your site would be best for the visitor to land on. (Which page would best make the sale in as few clicks as possible?)

For example:

You have a content site and you want people to sign up for your newsletter. Do you send them to your main page where they will be faced with a lot of great content choices with an opt in box on the side?

Or do you create a special page designed to exclusively invite the visitor to say yes to your newsletter? (Sometimes called a ‘squeeze’ page.) It’s clear that the option that offers the fewest distractions and the easiest path to a favorable answer is the right choice.

Speaking of squeezing, there are a lot of great uses for squeeze pages. They’re perfect when your main goal is the opt in as in the above example, but they’re also useful when your main goal is to make a sale – but the opt in would still be a pleasant second.

Let’s say that you want to sell a new information product that you’ve created about recycling your kitchen waste. You set up a sales letter, write a great ad and send visitors to the sales letter, right?

What if instead you set up a sales letter, but positioned it behind a squeeze page where you first offer them a free report or tip sheet. Then when they say yes to that, the form redirects them to your full sales letter. (Then whether or not they say yes here, you have their contact info and can continue to market your product through email, improving your chances of ultimately making a sale.)

Another landing page decision example:

You have a web store that sells a variety of pet accessories. You could put out an ad for ‘pet accessories’ but you’re going to get a better response if you advertise something specific and timely. It’s autumn, so let’s advertise pet sweaters.

Should you send your traffic to your main page and let them find the pet sweaters on their own? Or should you send them directly to the pet sweaters category? Definitely send them to the most appropriate page possible. If your shopping cart doesn’t make landing page decisions easy, you should create a special landing page just to go with the ad that you’ve placed.

Better to spend extra time coding a static page that sells well than risk your ad dollars hoping that customer will be able to figure things out on their own.

When you’re happy with your website overall and you’ve made a smart choice about a landing page, you can safely move ahead with looking for ways to advertise your project.

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Without website traffic it’s the same as building an expensive billboard and, instead of placing it alongside a busy highway, you hide it in your basement where nobody can see it.

Upon realizing they need traffic, most website owners run out and start blowing chunks of money and time trying to get “hits” to their sites, but they fail to realize that all “hits” are not created equal.

In their quest to get eyeballs to their websites, most online operators don’t realize there’s a big difference between driving “general” traffic to your website and driving “targeted” traffic.

Just getting any traffic is the same technique TV advertisers use. They flash ads on the screen in front of people who can’t afford or don’t need the advertised product.

Since general advertising can’t hit specific targets, they hit everyone and hope that someone in their target audience is actually watching at that moment. Spam, banner ads, “safe-lists” and similar traffic techniques fall into this “general” category.

Targeted traffic is made up of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say or sell online. These people either share the same interests or have an immediate need or problem they are trying to solve.

Targeted traffic is best because the people hitting your website have a much higher likelihood of actually making a purchase.

Targeted traffic comes from people following recommended links on other sites, typing in relevant keywords into the search engines, contextual based ads, or even reading articles you’ve written on a particular subject and then clicking over to your site for more information.

If you don’t already know where to find the best sources of targeted traffic for your website, you will need to experiment with lots of different sources to find the ones that bring visitors who give you the most “bang for your buck.”

The fastest way to determine which avenues provide the most targeted traffic is by using an “ad tracker”. An “ad tracker” is a simple program, residing on your web server, that tracks how many visitors your site gets from a particular source and how many of them purchased.

Though it sounds simple, most businesses don’t do this! Most businesses can’t tell you their visitor to buyer conversion percentage and, therefore, don’t know exactly how much they can invest in traffic generation and remain profitable.

Whether you pay for your website traffic with cash (pay-per-click search engines, contextual ads), or you pay for it with the sweat of your brow (article distribution, free search engines), you must identify your best and most profitable sources of targeted traffic that convert into buyers, subscribers, or leads.

Failure to identify and track where your buyers come from and then calculate how much they really cost you ultimately translates into failure for your online business.

1. Place colorful graphs, pie charts and other charts in your ad copy. Use charts that will grab a person’s eye and also support your product claims. For example, if you are selling a product that boosts website traffic, a screenshot of your site’s traffic stats can be very effective.

2. Highlight buying incentives like free bonuses and money back guarantees. You could place them in boxes or in front of a different colored background.

3. Use short sentences or sentence fragments in the body of your ad copy. A short burst of words can catch a skimmer’s eye with one quick glance.

4. Highlight all the important keywords and phrases in your ad copy. You could use bolding, underlining and color to highlight the important words. I see keywords both bolded and highlited in yellow in many ads nowadays. Don’t overdo it though.

5. Always remember that we live in a visual world. Place attention grabbing pictures above and within your ad copy. A powerful technique is to use before and after pictures of people using your product.

6. Use a headline that catches the attention of your target audience. One of the most effective ways is to use a free offer as your headline. The “shocking claim” headline can also be effective, provided that you can back up your claim, of course.

7. Make your ad’s keywords and phrases stand out by enlarging the text. This technique works wonders with headlines and sub headlines.

8. Make your products list of benefits and features stand out by using a symbol in front of each of them. The symbol could be a dash, solid circle, star, etc. You can use ordered or unordered lists in your HTML for this.

9. Use sub headlines to break up your ad copy and to capture a skimmers eye. You could make them even more powerful by highlighting them with color.

10. Use attention grabbing adjectives to describe your product. For example sizzling, incredible, high power, ultramodern, killer, eye popping, etc. But, be careful not to overdo it.

Using the above methods should dramatically improve the chances that your ad will get noticed by potential customers. And that is the first step to ultimately making the sale.

Firstly, you will need to have a good stat counter installed on your website. Some web hosts come with a counter already installed, but if you are not happy with the information it provides, you will want to find a new one. Most counters are quite easy to install, using copy and paste HTML. While a host-based counter will provide you with all your stats right there on your site, you will need to visit the website of an outside counter. There, you can set up projects for each website or blog that you own and monitor your stats. We recommend Statcounter and Google Analytics.

Now that you have a good statistic counter, you need to know what all those graphs and numbers mean. The best way to do this is to first understand the terminology used. Then you can start looking at the numbers.

Hits: These are the number of objects that have been loaded onto a browser. This means that if you have 10 objects on your page, plus the HTML file, you will register 11 hits every time someone looks at that page. An object can be anything from a picture or graphic to a widget or css file. Most webpages have several objects, some have hundreds! So, hits are not an indication of how many people actually visited your site.

Visitors: A visitor is someone who looks at your site and receives a cookie to mark them. That way you will know if they are a return visitor (someone coming back to take a second look) or a unique visitor. Computers that don’t allow cookies will register as a unique visitor each time the person returns to your page. Most counters check for both cookies and IP addresses to be extra sure if the visitor is returning or new.

Visits: These are how many times people have arrived at your site. They may be visits from returning visitors or unique ones. For this reason, the visits number can be much higher than your visitors, especially if you have a blog that is frequently updated.

Page Views: Page views differ from hits in that they only register the page as a whole. So if someone looks at your home page which has 24 objects, it would only appear as one page view, whereas it would register 24 hits every time someone looks at your home page.

Referral Page/Site: This will let you know how people are finding your website. Are they clicking through from a forum that you posted on or a search engine? It is handy to see if your backlinks are working.

Entry Page: Your stat counter may tell you what pages your visitors arrived on. Although we commonly think of the home page as the entry page, it is not always so. Many times, when an interior page is indexed on a search engine, a relevant search will turn up only that page and send visitors directly to an article or catalog page. Knowing where people are coming into your website allows you to adjust the pages accordingly.

Exit Page: This is obviously which page people are leaving your website from. Are they running for the hills when they reach your sales page? Maybe you will need to tweak it. Changing the pages that people usually click away from is a good way to keep your visitors longer.

Bounce Rate: This is the percent of visitors who leave your site immediately without visiting any other pages. Depending on the type of site you have, this could be anywhere from 20-70%. A very high bounce rate indicates a bad landing page or untargeted visitors.

Now that you understand the basics of your web traffic, it will be easier to tweak your website. Knowing when and where visitors are entering and exiting will help you make your site more efficient and useful, and in the long run, earn more money.

Put Your Website into Motion

Move things around, add more valuable content pages. Keep your site moving so it stays on the radar of the search engines. Search engines like sites that are constantly updating with new information. This lets them know that your site is staying active and relevant. Every article you write (or have ghost-written) can be submitted to article directories for more exposure to your target audience.

Test Your Site’s Flow

Your site’s content and navigation should flow when readers arrive. They should be able to enter your homepage or some other page on your site and feel right at home.

Make sure every page works in unison to bring the customer to your ultimate goal - a sale or a click! Make sure a link is included at the bottom of every page presentation for your products or services. Also, be sure all links in the sidebars are working properly. Your navigation should be straightforward and consistent on every page. Difficult navigation and bad inbound linking practices will not only hurt you in search engines but will also cause visitors to get frustrated and leave.

Proofread Your Site’s Presentation

You should read over your presentation several times to be sure it sounds enticing and grammatically correct. Ask a friend to read it as well. Make sure it reads smoothly and leads the visitor through the site. Every presentation page should contain the following:

*Powerful headline (Call to Action)
*Opening paragraph with a pull to read more
*Testimonials or quotes from you
*Images or Product Examples
*Closing for the sale
*Order instructions or a link to read more on your site

Test for Search Engine Friendliness

Your site should have a title and description in the meta tags that will pull a visitor in from a keyword search. Remember, when someone types in a keyword or key phrase at a search engine, your title will appear, then your brief description. This is your actual search engine listing. Having a powerful listing is just as important (if not more) as your presentation when they arrive at your site. Besides, your sales presentation doesn’t do a bit of good if the visitors never come!

Take a look at this example for a meta tag title and description under the key search phrase “101 personal website ideas.”

Title: 101 Personal Website Ideas - FREE!
Description: 101 Ideas for Creating Your Personal Website. Before reading the ideas below, please sign up for our FREE Newsletter offer called the Web Design Weekly …

Notice the title matches the key phrase, and the description re-emphasizes the phrase and leads the customer to click and read more. The description also offers a free service (subscription) from the start. This is crucial to getting visitors to your site from the search engines.

The example above is an actual search listing from Google for a web site ideas page. This one page listing brings in around 500 visitors per month to the web design training site. These are very targeted visitors!

All these factors working together will help build traffic to your site and turn your visitors into paying customers. This is one booster shot where a needle is not necessary!