We’re approximately halfway through the year. Do you know how your website is performing? Do you know the site visitor trends? Do you know the most important site fixes or upgrades that need to be made?
June and July are great times of the year to review and evaluate your website’s performance, and to give your site a boost heading into the second half of the year.
For B2B firms, it’s important to be ready to capture an increased number of site visitors after the summer vacation season. For online retailers, it’s important that you are doing everything you can now to ensure that you capitalize on the upcoming holiday season.
To that end, I encourage you to use the following checklist as part of your mid-year website checkup:
The MID-YEAR WEBSITE CHECKUP
Traffic Sources
Where are visitors coming from? Are you maximizing traffic from your marketing dollars? If not, re-examine your marketing mix and the dollars allocated to each channel. For reference, check out The Internet Marketing Checklist for Small Business.
Traffic Trends
Is your site traffic increasing, or decreasing? If it’s increasing, identify the biggest contributors and focus on these in the 2nd half of the year. If it’s decreasing, explore alternative marketing tactics.
Cost Per Visitor
Looking at the number of unique site visitors and your marketing costs, what is the marketing cost to bring a new visitor to your site? Are you optimizing your marketing spend over time so that the CPV is trending downwards?
Site Visitor Behavior
Analyze your site visitor behavior. Do visitors immediately leave your site upon landing there (“bouncing” from your site)? How long do they spend on your site? How many pages do they view while there? Which traffic sources lead to the desired on-site behavior, and which sources are probably driving unqualified leads? What can you change on your website to lead to more desirable behavior? For reference, check out: 11 Reasons Why People Leave Your Website.
Conversion Rate
What percentage of your site visitors are converting into leads or buyers? If your Conversion Rate is trending downwards, look at ways that you can test different adjustments to your site. For reference, check out: 19 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversions.
Revenue
Is overall revenue up or down? If you run an eCommerce site, check out these tips: eCommerce: 45 Tips to Turbocharge Your Sales.
Revenue Per Visitor
Looking at the number of unique site visitors and your revenue from the website (including subsequent offline sales through phone orders, etc.), what is the average revenue that each incremental visitor represents to your business? Is this number trending upwards? If not, you should test different adjustments to your website. Once again, if you run an eCommerce site, check out these tips: eCommerce: 45 Tips to Turbocharge Your Sales.
Site Experience
One of the best ways to learn how people go through your site is to sit down next to them and watch them. Have them talk out loud as they navigate through the site. See if any of your customers or prospects will do this for you. Or, you can put an ad on CraigsList.org and solicit prospects (matching a description aligned to your target audience) to sit down with you for a small fee. Or, if you can’t do any of the above, get a friend or family member to help you out. Learn which aspects of your site deliver a great experience, and which ones don’t.
Sites You Admire
Analyze websites that you like. Why do you like them so much? What is it that compels you to visit again and again? Why is it that you recommend certain sites to friends and colleagues? Perhaps you can learn a thing or two from these sites and apply to your own site, customized to your own site visitors’ needs, of course.
The Competition
And don’t forget to check out the competition. What new tactics are they executing this year? What have they abandoned in recent months? What do you like about their sites? What do you dislike about their sites. You can always learn something (what to do or what not to do) by analyzing the competition. For reference, check out: The Value of Website Competitive Analysis.
These are just a few tips to help you update your website and your Internet marketing plans to ensure increased business results in the second half of the year. If you need additional help, let me know below. Thanks!
