The Most Important Piece Of Your Small Business Website
March 30, 2009, 2:05 pm
If there’s a running theme in my blog posts here, it’s this: If your web site is not generating sales, you need to fix it immediately. The point of a web site for a small business is to make money – not build your brand, not prove your legitimacy, not make it look like you’re all “Web 2.0″ – MAKE MONEY.
You need to treat your web site as an active member of your sales staff. When anyone visits your site – whether you send someone to the site or whether they stumble upon it by accident – it needs to make the sale. It needs to get your visitors attention, pique their interest in your service or product, fuel their desire to buy from you and drive them to take action to close the sale.
It’s this last one that most often gets missed. It’s not enough to provide a phone number and hope someone remembers to contact you when it’s convenient for them – you need to provide a strong, clear call to action that the user can take immediately, otherwise you’ll lose them forever. This action is called a “conversion” – the moment your visitor converts into an actual customer. Nothing is more important to your small business website than conversions, and you need to know how well your web site is converting to know how good a sales person it is.
If you haven’t already, you need to set up some kind of statistics monitoring for your site. There are a lot of options out there, but the one I like most is Google Analytics – it’s free, it’s dead easy to set up and the statistics are presented in a way that is far less cryptic than many of the other options. It also includes “goal tracking”, which can quickly help you not only measure how well your site is converting, it can show you the pathways visitors are taking to your conversions, how many people are not completing the action and provide some hints as to why. In order to set up tracking, you’ll need to first identify the conversion on your site. If your site generates leads through a form, the conversion point is the page they see after the form has been submitted – the “thank you page”. If you sell products on your web site, the conversion point is the page visitors see after their credit card has been charged. You get the idea.
Your conversion rate is the number of individuals who have viewed your conversion point – which should only be accessible to those people who took the converting action – divided by the total number of unique visitors to your site. So, if 20 out of 100 unique visitors completed your contact form. that’s a conversion rate of 20%. Your web site should live and die by this number. Every decision you make about your website should take into account its affect on the conversion rate.
There are few reliable guidelines for what one can consider a “good” conversion rate – there are just too many variables. Whatever your current conversion rate is, you can always do better. How your rate compares to the rest of your industry is not as important as simply knowing what it is and making incremental changes to your site and your marketing plan to watch it grow month by month.
I’ll be discussing ways you can analyze your numbers and work to improve your conversion rates in the weeks to come. But, if you’re not already measuring your site’s statistics, there’s nothing I can do to help you. Your task today is to start measuring your site’s visitors – where are they coming from? What are they viewing at your site? How did they find your site? How long are they staying? Why are they leaving? In order to make any real sense of your stats, you’ll need to collect at least a month’s worth of information, though you can often start seeing trends after a week. If you’re completely lost on this, I can help. If you can’t make a decision about what system to use, go sign up for a Google Analytics account and start using it – you can always change later if you find it inadequate to your needs (though I genuinely believe it’s all you need).
Lastly, don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers – no statistics measuring system is perfect, and none of them can accurately reflect everything that’s happening on your site. The actual numbers are far less important than the trends – are you getting more or fewer visitors over time? Are they staying on the site longer? Are they viewing more of your pages when they’re there? And, more importantly, are more of them taking the necessary steps to convert from mere visitors to true customers? If you’re not interested in measuring for this information, you should reconsider your reason for having a web site.
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