I bet you can find at least five things that your website should be doing or doing better. Odds are you have built a site and you are getting some traffic but things are not exactly how you thought they would go. Well lets take a look at five things that may help you get better results. Some are so simple it may surprise you that you haven't thought of them on your own.
1) Does your site help the user solve a problem? This is either a yes or no. In this day and age the consumer is looking for an answer for their problem, if your product does that then explain it any way you can. This may be a video or a white paper or something of the sort. Give away the information so that the user remembers how helpful you were, they will end up telling people through word of mouth.
2) Do you know what your visitors are doing on your site? Odds are you think you do but you could be wrong. You need to get some sort of analytics set up and see how a user is navigating through your site. You may not even know what your most popular pages are,or even what your worst pages are. You may be focusing on the wrong things and wasting time.You also need to know how people are finding your site. Get a neighbor to sit down in front of a computer and put them on your site and see how they navigate it, it will not be what you thought. get a pen and paper and tell them to give you the honest truth.
3) Do you have an email newsletter? Getting traffic is hard enough so once you get a customer you should try and make them a returning customer. This saves you the worry of trying to rank in search engines and also decreases your advertising cost as you already have that customer. A lifetime customer is the best investment you can make for your site.
4) Do you have a FAQ page? Whenever you get an email asking questions about your site or product make that question into a line on your FAQ page as it will be looked for again on your site. Your answer will help others find you and use your services. It will also end up being keyword rich content that will attract the search engines and get you good long tail keywords.
5) Do you have trust pages? Every website needs to develop trust with the potential customer. Your site needs a page for privacy policy, contact us, terms of use, disclaimer, and let the customer know what you are doing with their information and what they can expect from your site.
I bet if you are not doing these things your site is not doing what you want it to do.
Great tips Vinny. I really believe the biggest mistake you can make on your website is to not have a “about us” page. This is great, because before people buy something they want to know a little bit about the webmaster. Anyone can create a site, but it really builds trust if you have a good “about us” page. Trust equal sales ๐
Vinny,
I really enjoyed this article and will focus on the things you have mentioned here. Thanks, this is really helpfull stuff..
Vinny,
In point 2 your quite rightly stress the importance of analytics, I use Google analytics but this is not really comprehensive. Is there something you can recommend, free if possible because I have spent enough so far without any return.
Thanks
Russ