My website's not working - Why?
You've had your website built, you've managed to get it listed relatively well in Google and, as in the movie "Field of Dreams" - "you've built it, now they're coming", BUT…
The big 'BUT', usually, is... "my website's not working for me. I'm getting lots of visitors but no enquiries/sales. It's a waste of time and money".
The frightening thing is, your website may well be a waste of time and money if you didn't, at the outset, identify what you wish your site to accomplish and then guide your visitors through a very easy route to do this.
If you have an ecommerce site and hide the add to cart button, no one will ever order anything. If you have a fantastic product with lots of "call to action" hotspots throughout your site, but you have an irrelevant, ill designed landing page, you may well lose your new visitor who gives your site, on average, about 10 seconds worth of their judgement.
The difficult thing to do, is analyse why your site's not working. Help is at hand though. Thanks to those wonderful Google people and Analytics, you can examine lots of statistics that will help. If you've not got Analytics on your site, you're missing out, big time. To give you a flavour, I'll point out a couple in this article.
The first being "Bounce Rate". What this figure tells you is the percentage of people that hit your landing page and go no further. Why is this relevent? If you had a site with 1,000 visitors a month and an 85% bounce rate you'd essentially have 150 decent visitors, most would have dumped out of your site straight away. Holding peoples attention is paramount to your sites success, the longer the stay, the more pages they view, the more sold on your brand they are, the more likely they are to use your services or buy your products. Getting a low bounce rate must be one of your goals.
Talking of goals, Google allows the setting up of "Conversion Goals". These basically track a visitors journey around your site and flag if they've completed one of your goals. For instance, you may track a visitor landing on your homepage, clicking to a product, putting said product in the shopping basket, checking out and eventually hitting your receipt page. This would be a completed goal to which you could see the percentage of visitors achieving this. What's interesting is if a visitor dumps out through this process, the goal tracker will register this. So, if a number of visitors dump out at the checkout, this may hi-light a problem there, and so on.
As you can see if you poke around in analytics there's a lot of interesting things you can read and act upon to make your site work for you, instead of it being the banana skin that your business slips up on.
For all of your web related needs, why not give us a call to see if we can help? Our number is 01858 469988 or email us on steve@cagedfish.co.uk
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