Your website is more than a simple business listing. It’s the virtual extension of your company and, if leveraged correctly, can raise your profile, draw in customers, and power business growth. Of course, getting your website business-ready takes some doing. It’s not a one-and-done endeavor. You need to keep optimizing and upgrading it over time. There’s a lot of competition out there and the market is constantly changing.
Monitoring your site’s performance is a key part of the refinement process. Here, the Pickerington Area Chamber of Commerce takes a look at how keeping an eye on your site, in various ways, offers significant benefits for your business:
Keep Tabs on User Behavior
Website visitors will interact with your website in specific ways. Analyzing their exact behavior – the content they consume, the products they most like, the number of times they reach out, for instance – will give you insight into their wants and needs. You can use this information to design accurate buyer personas and then create powerful marketing campaigns that better appeal to their sensibilities.
If you are working with a marketing team, share this data with them and use it to revise marketing strategies. There are many advantages of a free online PDF editor in this situation so that your team can share mockups, sketches, or demos and request feedback from other team members and you for approval before officially creating the materials. Each member can add notes, highlights, or virtual sticky notes to guide revisions and praise great changes. When the team is happy with the overall product, it can be turned into real marketing materials and sent out to your customers.
Use Process Mining to Create a Better User Experience
Process mining is a discipline that measures business processes, gathers data about them, and then uses that data to improve them. You can use this discipline to better align your website with customers. You can, for instance, influence buying decisions by creating attractive landing pages. Not only can you optimize your site with this technique, but you can also increase sales, manage risk, and find hidden growth opportunities. For having good task mining, you need to identify potential data sources, create a timeline, and determine key stakeholders.
Spotting and Troubleshooting Problems
Every website has its fair share of problems. Some examples are site downtime, servers getting hacked, data getting stolen, pages failing to render, 404 errors, incorrect information, software bugs, and more. A problem can throw a spanner in the works as far as business is concerned. It also negatively affects your reputation. Keeping an eye on your website is the best way to detect problems quickly and troubleshoot them.
Optimizing Site Speed and Page Loading Times
According to Queue IT, a web page load time delay of 2 seconds leads to a bounce rate increase of 103 percent. If you want people to stay on your website, essentially, you have to make sure it loads quickly. Not only do customers expect it, but so does Google. Your page loading speed is directly tied to your search engine page ranking. Frequently monitoring your website is essential to making sure the speed is up to par.
Gauging the Overall Popularity and Relevance of Your Business
The amount of traffic that your website attracts, the visitor behavior, and how your site compares to your competitors’ are all clear indications of the overall health of your business. When the incoming traffic is steady or improving, the bounce rate low, and the conversion rate positive, you know everything is working as it should be. When there’s been a week-on-week or month-on-month decrease in key metrics, you know some things need improving. Similar Web offers a free look at how your website ranks in your niche.
Choose Appropriate Performance Metrics
There are hundreds of performance indicators or metrics you could measure related to your website – but not all of them are relevant. It’s a good idea to focus on a few key metrics and base your website improvement efforts around them. For instance, the time your customers stay on your website, indicating the quality of your content (among other things), is a good metric to measure. You can also look at the conversation rate, which shows how many of your site visitors are transacting on your site – whether by purchasing something or submitting information.
Gather and Apply Your Data
You can use your CMS, Google Analytics, or similar third-party tools to automatically track relevant data points from your website. Following a scientific technique like process mining allows you to put the data to good use. Keep improving your site and, over time, you will experience big benefits, ranging from more credibility to extra revenues.
Grow your business by building relationships with other local entrepreneurs and accessing unique resources offered by the Pickerington Area Chamber of Commerce. Join us today!