10 Ways to Improve Your Website

How familiar are you with your website? Choose one of the following:

1. I know all the key metrics and performance points of my site, I know which metrics need to be improved, and I am running controlled tests to fix them.
2. I have a pretty good idea of what our site is doing, and I think I remember the conversion rate.
3. I'd recognize the home page, probably, if you showed it to me.
4. We have a website?

Whether you choose "a" or "d," you are probably well aware of the benefits a good website can provide. Twenty-four-hour availability, global reach, and the ability to process orders immediately are all among the most compelling website benefits. But how do you know your website is doing all that it is capable of doing for your online and offline business? The following list includes 10 specific steps you can take to find out how your website is currently functioning and what you can do to increase its overall effectiveness.

1. Guide Your Audience
Okay, you've heard the phrase "target your audience" (it's almost a marketing cliché) but what if you got more specific? What if you actually used your website to guide your audience? Successful online and offline businesses use their website to do exactly that, and here's how you can do it too.

To guide your audience you need to ask yourself the following question: What do you want people to do on your website?

You should be able to answer this question with one simple sentence (e.g. I want to sell my visitors my products, I want to encourage my visitors to download a product trial that will lead to offline conversion, I want to build a brand to support my retail sales, etc). Once you know what you want visitors to do on your website you have a website strategy that should shape every other decision you make in regards to your site.

2. Refine Your Shopping Cart
Shopping carts are often the single most effective area to focus on. Know your fallout rate (i.e. the percentage of people who start the checkout process, but never finish it) and know what you're doing to improve it. Website analytics come in handy for this process. Many sites have fallout rates well above 50 percent—many even well above 80 or 90 percent! Imagine a retail store where eight out of every 10 people who get in line to buy their groceries end up leaving the store and abandoning their carts. It's a rare sight in real life, but it happens all the time online.

3. Manage Your Entry Pages
Most companies spend a lot of time crafting the messages and promotions on their home page. Those same companies are often surprised to find that while their home page is the single most visited page on their website, product description pages and other pages—which have been indexed by search engines—receive far more traffic as a whole and yet are poorly managed. Find out where your website visitors are entering your website and focus on those pages accordingly. If you have questions on how to access this important website analytics data, feel free to contact 10x Marketing.

4. Build up Your Stickiness
An "exit page" is the last page a visitor sees before he leaves your website. Ideally, the number one exit page would be your shopping cart's "thank you" page. However, the reality is that you will most likely find many other pages from which people have been exiting your site. Find out where visitors are leaving your website and take the necessary steps to increase its "stickiness," or the amount of time visitors spend on your pages and overall website. Again, if you have questions in regards to the "stickiness" of your website, feel free to contact 10x Marketing.

5. Know Your Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is easy to calculate: take the total number of your website's visitors and divide it by the total number of online sales. Two percent is generally considered to be the "world wide average." This percentage can be misleading, however. Your industry could have a much higher or lower percentage depending on the products that you offer and on what actions you consider to be conversions.

Find out what your conversion rate is today. Find out what it was last month. The direction your conversion rate is heading is one of the best indicators of your website's level of effectiveness. Conversion rate enhancement services are also available from 10x Marketing. These processes are designed to evaluate the progress of your website and to improve the percentage of visitors that buy products or complete some other "form of action" on your website.

6. Get Familiar with Your Visitors' Likes and Dislikes
If you have a product search feature on your website, take a look at the log file it generates. Ask your technical personnel how to access this log file if you don't know how to access it already. Once you've accessed the log file, you should be able to see a list of every term or product that people have searched for on your website. With this information you will be able to answer the following questions:

1. What are your website's visitors interested in?
2. What are your website's visitors having a hard time finding through your standard navigation process?

The answer to the first question should complement your overall promotional strategy. After all, your visitors should be interested in the products and services you offer. If for instance, you notice that there are many unrelated searches on the log file, it's possible that your website or its purpose is unclear to visitors. These issues can be addressed with website assessment and development services.

The answer to question two should help you to establish goals for the redesign of your website to make it easier for visitors to navigate your website and complete desired actions. Again, this can be addressed by website development and additional conversion rate enhancement services.

7. Keep Tabs on Your Top Sellers
If you offer a broad range of products, your website can provide a rich testing ground for price sensitivity and market trends. Look for your top selling products and watch the changes in the sales of these products as you run promotions and discounts. The information you glean from this exercise will allow you to create more effective promotions and to increase your conversion rate.

8. Recruit the Right Referral Sources
Referring sources are, in general, websites which advertise your online banners or pay-per-click ads at a pre-determined cost. However, referral sources can also be generated with blogs or links from other websites. Find out which websites are driving traffic to yours and see what those websites are saying about you. If you want to inject comments into a discussion thread (i.e. forums, message boards, blog comments, etc.), make sure to do it openly. Corporate shills are easily detected but honest communication from a company can be a powerful thing. To find out more on how to recruit referring sources, contact 10x Marketing.

9. Implement Search Engine Optimization Practices
Are you paying for every visitor who comes to your site? Or does your site generate a steady stream of free visitors from search engines? If you have any kind of a brand at all, you should be ranked on every keyword related to that brand. And even without specific branding, you should be able to get free visitor traffic from searches for keywords that are related to your industry, products, and benefits.

Most tracking systems for your website will give you a list of search terms that visitors have used to find your website. Go to Google, MSN or Yahoo! and type in some of the keywords your visitors are using. Notice where you rank (especially in comparison with your competitors) on each search engine's result listings. If your competitors are ranking higher than you, search engine optimization is something that you should focus on in order to increase the amount of traffic that goes to your website.

10. Generate Repeat Business
How much repeat business is your site generating? Repeat business is a great indicator of success. Industries will differ—repeat business will be low if you're selling tombstones, for example—but be sure to compare your website with your competitors'. Do you have more or less repeat business than they do?

One method of generating repeat business is to effectively follow-up with your clients. If you're not capturing email addresses on your website, you should be! Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and popular ways to encourage repeat business.

Anything Else?
Of course, every website is different. There is no single "ideal" to which every site should conform. But understanding the 10 points outlined above should help you get moving in the right direction. 10x Marketing can provide you with a comprehensive online marketing solution including access to site analytics as well as conversion rate enhancement, search engine optimization, email marketing and site redesign to get your website headed in the right direction.

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