Tips To Improve Your Online Marketing and Site Performance
I recently found the following article from Christian Franqui’s blog. It portrays an interesting approach towards optimizing your site’s preformance statistics.
It’s no secret that any marketing effort is a tough one. Generally, the true measure of success for any marketing campaign whether online or otherwise, is this: did it produce the results you were looking for? Did you receive any new leads, did your monthly recurring revenue increase as a result of your campaign?
Nowadays, just looking into how many people have visited your site is not enough. It’s just as important to find out how the website is performing as far as how your visitors are reacting to the site elements you’ve laid out for them. Remember, that for every action there is a reaction, in our case, an interaction.
The problem with websites today is that there’s entirely too much visual information to process. To include more information than is actually necessary, is counter-productive. Studies show that the average reading level of the United States is that of a fifth grader. As embarrassing as that is, we have to come to terms that we are now a society of scanners. We have the attention span of a peanut, and with the millions of websites out there to choose from, it’s that much more important to find exactly what it is we’re looking for in the least amount of effort.
How do we overcome this? In the larger scheme of online marketing, the closer we get to relate and know what our audience needs, the better we can serve them. It’s no longer just enough to think we know what our audience wants. Actually, it’s never been enough. Those who have learned the hard way know best that keeping a “let’s do business as usual” mentality will kill your business, especially on the Internet. Visitors are selfish, when they visit any website, they’re going to want things their way and if you’re smart, you’ll adapt.
What Can I Do To Adapt With My Audience?
Start by doing your homework. Taking a close look into what is going on in your own website is really important. If you don’t have some type of analytics software installed on your site, then you are already behind. Study your site traffic as it will reveal a boat-load of great information. But knowing what you’re looking at and what to look for takes some time and a learning curve as numbers don’t do that good of a job to tell the entire story.
Ask yourself, did that increase in pages viewed mean that visitors are more engrossed with your website or just plain lost? Each page should have a purpose, some may need a lot of copy such as sales pages but then again some pages are designed to funnel traffic to another page. Keeping this in mind, a long amount of time spent on a page can be positive for such sales pages, but very negative for a funnel page. Long story short, your numbers are necessary to understanding patterns and behaviors in your website and it is very important to examine them in context.
How Else Can I Ensure My Online Marketing Is A Success?
Make sure you’ve done all you can to sustain and surpass yourself from your competitors. Study your competitors and dissect what it is that is making them successful or unsuccessful. One of the tools you’ll want to take advantage of is the SEO Moz Term Extractor. This sweet ass tool will actually extract the major keywords in which a website is trying to rank for in SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages). Knowing your competition’s strategies will give you the direction you need to take when optimizing your own site. Take a good hard look at how your competition is optimizing their site, try to do what they’re doing, and then get a leg up on them by getting more back links where they lack, write more keyword-targeted articles than they have etc.
Receiving Feedback From My Audience
Just as any other discipline, if you don’t receive feedback based on your performance, how else can you improve? Not only will you receive comments on whether your site is serving your visitors you anticipated, but you can ask for feedback on aesthetics, page and navigational elements or presentation. All key elements to the success of your site and how your online marketing efforts will be determined. Make sure you provide a freebie for your users as taking the time to provide feedback is usually a big hassle for them. It’s very easy to entice them with free downloads or a small discount on something; Trust me, feedback is invaluable, it is an investment for your website. Take advantage of some of the free feedback modules you can place on your website. One I recommend is Get Satisfaction. You can install a free widget that will place a tab on the side of your website for users to click and write their ideas, questions, problems or praises based on your website.
Bottom line, understanding how your site visitors react and behave on your site will help you make the necessary improvements that are needed to optimize and maximize your marketing efforts. I welcome anyone’s thoughts on this topic. I’m certain there are quite many other things you can do to be successful on the net. Please share so that we can all benefit.
Source: http://christianfranqui.com/latest-posts/tips-to-improve-your-online-marketing-and-site-performance