Expect a Return on Your Investment from Your Website

The name of the game is turning your website visitors into paying customers. There are so many Billions of dollars of buying decisions that are influenced by a company's website. This fact makes a person wonder why so few businesses are focused on testing and tweaking their websites to obtain the maximum return on their investment.

Whats even worse is that so many businesses look at designing their website to have a flashy appearance and flawless graphical appeal. But the bottom line is that you can have the most stunning website on the internet but if no one can find it, what does it matter? Having a great looking website is where it all starts, but the true measure of the worth of a website is in how well it attracts visitors and then converts browsers into buyers.

A website needs to start with a goal, what is it exactly that you want to accomplish? Maybe you want your website visitors to sign up for your company newsletter or maybe you have an ecommerce website where you want the visitor to make a purchase. Some other goals could be to increase the sales of your brick and mortar store, generate sales leads, reduce your adverting or support cost and even simplify some of your business processes, both internal and with clients. Whatever your goal is, as long as you have one from the beginning you will be ahead of most of your competitors who never thought it through.

In our experience is takes just as much money to create a website that performs poorly rather than a lead generating powerhouse. So if you are going to spend the money make sure you do it right and if you don't know how, hire someone that does. It makes no sense guessing or wasting time with trial and error when you could pay someone that can set your website up for success.

So let's assume for now that you have defined a goal, you consulted with a company that can set you up for success and the preverbal train (your website) is going down the tracks and starting to pick up steam. What do you do now? This is the part where you measure, monitor, adjust and control the direction your website is heading.

For this you will want to have some sort of analytics installed that will give you very detailed information. You will want to know things like the total number of visits, how many unique visitors, what page they came in on, what page they left on and most importantly how they got to your website.

They could have come from a referring website that links into you or they could have typed in some search terms and found you in Google. You will also want to make note of the keywords that brought them to your website. It is possible that maybe you were ranking on page 3 but they still found you. But since you know the keyword and where they came from you can now take specific actions to improve the ranking for that particular keyword.

Now that you are getting traffic and monitoring it, your last step is to track the conversions. You are going to be looking at how many visitors that found their way to a specific page and took a specific action that you intended as the main goal for that page. It could be 100 to 1, 50 to 1 or even 10 to 1, it all depends on your offer and how targeted the traffic getting to the page actually is. What you want to do now is look for ways to increase conversion. Sometimes it could be as little as changing a few words on the website. Other times it may require an entire overhaul of the page and the message.

As you can see a website is really a major extension of your business. When planning a website always take the time to define your goals, develop a plan to meet the goals and constantly monitor and adjust to improve your conversions.

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