Beat The Credit Crunch Series :: Taking Stock
As you’ll be aware, doom and gloom reports of the alleged ‘credit crunch’ are all over the news at the moment. Personally, I think businesses need to stand up and fight rather than accepting the worst-case scenarios. Now’s the time to invest in improving your business, improving efficiency, working harder and working smarter.
This series of articles will provide relevent tips and ideas which you can implement to push your business forward. Since we are web specialists, you guessed it, most of our articles will concentrate on how you can make the most of the web to maximise sales.
This first article will address what you need to do to assess your current position, take stock of where you’re at, and what you can do to improve. The main objectives of the majority of business websites is to give information, gather leads and ultimately draw in customers. If your website isn’t meeting your expectations or generating enough leads then you (or we!) need to start investigating the possible reasons. One reason could be that you simply aren’t getting enough visitors - time to get your online marketing plan in writing.
Checking Your Website Traffic
There are many great website analytics / statistics applications out there which will allow you to drill down into a variety of statistics, from how many visitors you receive to what keywords those visitors typed into the search engines to find you. One of the best analytics programs out there is Google Analytics, which we can set up for you if you would like it installed.
Setting the Goals
Say you want to attract just ten more orders a month from your website, and you have a conversion rate of just 1% (this means that it takes 100 visitors for 1 person to make a purchase). For one order, you would need 100 visitors, so for 10 orders you would need 1,000 per month - easy! So now you have your goal you need to formulate a plan to make it happen.
Increasing Traffic
There are a variety of methods you can use to increase the traffic to your website, such as:
- Search engine optimisation (more on this in later articles)
- Increasing website content - create new pages, add new content, keep it fresh and up to date!
- Promoting your site - visit online directories, industry forums, blogs and more - comment on articles and try to get a link back to your website.
Leveraging Your Website
In addition to increasing the traffic to your website, you need to make sure that you are making the most of your existing site. Have you actually asked the target audience what they think of your site? It could be missing something important to the user - for example if you sell products online, your target market might be overly sensitive to the security and privacy of their details. You need to show what you are doing to address their concerns, and questions, in advance. Add testimonials, secure SSL Certificates, a privacy policy, even adding a padlock icon somewhere on the page might aid their willingness to purchase. Basically, you need to make sure that your site meets your user’s needs. Once it does so, your conversion rates will increase and you’ll make more sales. Imagine your conversion rate has jumped from 1% to 2%, now you will get 20 orders per 1,000 visitors, instead of the 10 previously.
I hope you have gotten some value from this article - if you need any help implementing any of the above ideas then we would be happy to lend our advice and expertise. There will be many more articles in this series which will expand on what I’ve written here, and will also deal with a range of credit-crunch busting tips and tricks.
