Website Must Haves for Continuous Improvement

A website is never really finished. It should be constantly getting better as time goes on. But how do you improve on a website when you don't know what is working and what isn't working. Here is the number one website must have to beat all the other website must haves.

Measure and Track Your Website Analytics

In order to make smart marketing decisions, information is essential. With the proper analytics tools installed on your website, you will know who has visited your website, where they came from, and what they were looking for.

Here are some elements that you should be monitoring on your website:

Site Traffic - keep an eye on your web traffic and try to increase the number of new and repeat visits you get and watch out for any trends that may appear.

Traffic Source - an important thing to watch is the source of the traffic you are getting so that you can relate your marketing efforts to your traffic trends. Some traffic sources you should track are:

• Organic search traffic - the traffic that makes it to your site as a result of an unpaid search result.
• Direct traffic - that's when people find your website by typing in your domain name.
• Referral traffic - these are visits via a click-through from another website or from an advertisement.
• Social media traffic - website traffic generated by social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

Landing pages - these are the lead work horses for your website, so it's important to keep an eye on their performance. Landing page conversion ratios can reach as high as 60%. Their performance varies based on the strength of the copy and design and the overall appeal of the offer. Identify your best performing landing pages and analyze what makes them so effective. Then try to replicate the formula.

Tracking social media - social media is a powerful online marketing tool. It's important to track not only the site traffic generated by social media, but also track your reach - like the number of Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest followers you have. How many connections on these social media sites do you communicate with each week? By tracking your reach, you can see how you're building your communication network.

Track your blog subscribers and the number of views of your blog articles. you may be surprised to see how much your blog traffic snowballs.

You can't improve what you don't measure. So install Google analytics on your site, it's free, and you'll be able to track and measure your efforts to see what is working and what isn't.

If you would like more information on how to make your website work hard for you, give us a call at 336-684-6505 or check out the services we provide at printandwebdesigner.com