A good business website is one that answers important questions, offers value, and generates leads and customers for your business. You may know that the content, design, and structure of your website directly impacts your lead generating efforts. However, you may not know exactly how to measure that impact or how to improve it. The key to improving your website is in analyzing the data. Website analytics are intimidating because they can be difficult to make sense of, but we’ve got you covered. In this post, we’ll go over six aspects of your website analytics that you can understand and use to improve your website.
Analyze Your Keywords
Increase the number of potential customers who find your website.
Take a look at the keywords that people are using to find your website. Are they typing in your business name, or are they typing in words or phrases related to your offerings? When searching for a product or service, people don’t type business names into the search engine; they search for the product or service they are looking for, in their particular location or for their specific circumstances. This is why getting found for relevant searches is of the utmost importance, especially if your business name doesn’t include or indicate your offerings.
To increase the number of people who find your website, work on your search engine optimization. Try to get each page to rank for different keywords, all of which should be related to your business, products, and services.
Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Increase engagement on your website, to help with conversion and SEO.
The bounce rate of a website is the percent of your website visitors who exit without visiting a second page. A bounce rate around 50% is okay, but if it’s higher than that you’ll want to work on engaging your website visitors more. To reduce your bounce rate, make sure that your navigation bar is present on every page of your site, so that visitors can access different pages without having to use the back button or return to the homepage every time. Also, include links in your pages to other pages on your website, either by hyperlinking within the text or using call to action buttons.
Bounce rate is important because it is a ranking factor for search engines. To make sure they continue providing quality and credible results for their users, search engines will lower a page’s rank if they see that users are not engaging with it.
Optimize Popular Pages
Optimize secondary pages on your website, where visitors are more likely to convert.
The homepage of a website typically has the highest traffic, but don’t forget about the next couple of popular pages. The quantity of traffic on these other pages may be lower, but the quality of that traffic may very well be higher. This is because visitors on your homepage are most likely getting acquainted with your business, while visitors to the other pages are interested and want to learn more.
To improve your website, identify your “runner-up” pages and insert calls to action on them, as visitors here may be more likely to convert.
Increase Referral Traffic
Use your network and social media to increase your referral traffic.
Search engines aren’t the only means by which a potential customer can find your website. In addition to search, two other sources of website traffic are direct and referral. Direct visitors refer to people who typed your website address directly into their browser. They may have heard about you from someone else or through an advertisement and decided to learn more by investigating your website.
Referral visitors are those who arrived by clicking on a link to your website from another website—not to be confused with a search engine like Google—such as an influencer blog post or social media post). If your referral traffic is low, reach out to people in your network who could include a link in their content to your website. You might also want to reach out to local media outlets for any publicity opportunities. In addition, be sure to maintain an active presence on social media, posting regularly with links to helpful and informative blog posts and website pages.
Improve Lead Rate
Optimize your site for lead generation with tracking and contact forms.
How many website visitors do you get each week or month? How many of those visitors convert into leads or customers? To be able to find out if your website is generating leads, you’ll need to use tracked links for your landing pages, have a tracked phone number on your website, and also replace any publicly visible email addresses with contact forms. This will help your website to not only generate leads, but also to find out which activities are generating the most leads.
Your number of leads is not as important as the percentage of website visitors that convert into leads. The more traffic your website gets, the more leads you should be getting. If your lead rate is stagnant or declining despite growing traffic, you may want to check out this post: Three Free Ways to Generate More Leads from Your Website.
Analyze Long-Term Trends
Stay on your toes to ensure an upward overall trend.
Take a look at your number of website visitors over a long period of time (such as one year or more). Is the graph flat, trending down, or trending up? It goes without saying that you want your traffic to be trending upward. If it is flat, you probably need to brush up on your SEO or introduce some new strategies such as social media campaigns or online advertising. If your traffic is trending downward, your competitors may be marketing more aggressively effectively than you.
With an understanding of the metrics, your business website can be a powerful lead-generating tool. Take some time to get familiar with the data. You won’t be an expert right away, but the more time you spend with it the better you’ll be able to make sense of it, and the more efficiently you can improve your marketing strategies.
For more information or consultation regarding your digital strategy, please contact one of our DMG + ThriveHive Specialists.
