How to improve the effectiveness of your website and increase website ROI – WEBv5.com – Saratoga, NY

How to improve the effectiveness of your website and increase website ROI – WEBv5.com – Saratoga, NY

Business owners in and around Albany, NY to Saratoga, NY contact me all the time about helping them to improve, update, or create a website for their business.  In our first meeting, I try to get a good handle on “why they think their website needs improvement” and “what success would look like.”

Here are some questions I often get in a first meeting.

1. So what do you think about the look of my website? – I never answer that one.  “Look” is subjective and if my opinion doesn’t match that of the person who asked the question, this could be a short meeting.  Instead, I turn it around.  I say “Look is subjective.  Tell me what you think.”

The look of the site is very important in general, but there are many, many ways to make a website look good.  What really matters is how it works.  If your site looks great, but isn’t intuitive and easy to use, visitors will leave no matter “how pretty” your site is.

Looks matter, but don’t get caught up in look alone or your website won’t be effective.

2. Should I use facebook, twitter, linked in, foursquare, and all the social media tools? – “Probably not, but let’s talk about it.” I say much to their shock.  Each social media platform needs it’s own strategy.  The strategy you use for facebook is completely different than that for twitter.  Usually, I ask how many hours a week they want to spend on social media and they hum and hah.  So I ask if they want to pay someone to do that for them. More silence.  The fact of the matter is that unless you have a strategy and time (or resources) to implement that strategy you should use the tools at all.  In social media marketing, doing just a little of something can be worse than doing nothing at all.

3. Is my website built right? – Maybe, but without running some diagnostic tests and “looking under the hood” it can be very hard to tell.  Car mechanics can not look at your car in a parking lot and tell you if it is in good mechanical shape, just as website designers can’t simply look at your site and tell you how well it is built.

SO…. how SHOULD a business owner evaluate their website?

I tell clients that a website is kind of like a virtual employee.  Employees need job descriptions, so too does your website need a job description.

What is it that you expect your website to do??

1. Give your website a JOB DESCRIPTION.  Spend 15 minutes and scribble down some ideas.  Think about those ideas for a day or so, then come back and write a real job description, just as though your website was a true employee.  Do you use your site for lead generation, lead qualification, sales, back-office management functions, sales, client portals, etc.  Here is a great read on creating employee job descriptions that will help you with your WEBSITE JOB DESCRIPTION: http://www.bizfilings.com/toolkit/sbg/office-hr/hiring-workers/job-descriptions-effective.aspx

2. Use Google Analytics – There are other competing services and you can use one of those if you want but it is mission critical to use some analytics service. Google Analytics can give you lotf of data points to help understand what is working and what isn’t.  DON’T GUESS… USE MATH. Math doesn’t lie (well at least not often and not well).  Analytics helps you understand who is visiting your site, how long they stay, where they go, what search terms led them to your site and more. After about six months of running google analytics, I sit down with my clients to look at the numbers and see what we can gleen from them.  This is always a VERY interesting meeting for both me and my client.  Every client is very surprised by a couple of things they find.  Proper use of analytics tools can greatly increase the website’s ROI.

3. Your business evolves, so too should your website. – Is your business the same as it was a year ago? I doubt it.  Websites need to be built in such a way that they can EASILY evolve with your business.  We are aPWordPress website design and development company because wordpress makes it easy for business owners to keep their website up-to-date and allow the website to evolve with their business.

4. Website Design and Search Engine Fundamentals – There are basic fundamentals that any and all websites should have; meta tags, descriptions, page descriptions, good clean code, etc.  You may need some professional help to explore these areas of your website, but it is certainly worth doing depending on your website’s job description.  If the only people you want to go to your site are people you have personal met and invited to your website than these “fundamentals” may not be very important to you.  If you are using your website to get search engine traffic or if lead generation is among the duties of your website, then this step is critical.

So with these new parameters, you can better understand the effectiveness of your business or organizational website.

Next we look at how to create a Website ROI…. first we need the website job description and the analytics.

If your business in in the Albany, NY – Schenectady, NY – Saratoga, NY area, we offer a free consultation to talk about these things or a $325 website evaluation with report and recommendations for businesses regardless of location.