Monitoring & Improvements

So now you’ve got everything set up. The website is done, your social media is all set up. You’ve got your landing pages all complete and your PPC marketing is starting to deliver clicks. You’ve even started getting some decent backlinks. So you are all set now right? You can just coast now, right? No WAY! Not by a long shot. You’ve really only just begun.

 

To use a sports metaphor that I think we can all grasp is that all you’ve done up to this point is assemble the tools, the team to get it done. It is like you set up a NASCAR team and now you have to go race. Or a Football team and now you have to go play the season… Do those teams blindly stick to the plan they set out at the beginning of the season?  Of course not. Things happen through the course of the season and adjustments need to be made. Why wouldn’t you do the same thing for your business? 

 

That is where many small to medium sized business owners fail to realize that there is no guaranteed way to create content the first time through that you know is going to be the absolute most effective at creating visitors into conversions.  You can do all the research and get your best assumptions based on past performance but something like the color of a button can affect business as much as 10% on a page. An image, I’ve seen it push conversion 30% higher based on the header image.   I only knew that because we had the pages monitored top to bottom and did the testing ourselves and would have never known. Missing out on all those conversions. Building it, is really just the start. Now you are off to the races. 

Do you have all the bases covered on your website?

  • Navigation
  • Keyword Density
  • 100% Mobile Compliant
  • Reading comprehension level
  • Images optimized
  • Site Speed
  • Landing Pages
  • Internal Links
  • Analytics and other monitoring apps

 

Is every ‘T’ Crossed and ‘I’ dotted? You need to have it all taken care of because if you are short just one thing and you’re competitors aren’t, you’re not going to outrank them. 

And Every thing Off-site

  • Relative Social Media Accounts set up
  • Accounts Linked to Dashboard/Manager
  • Link Building
  •  

Analytics

Google is the king of search but all search engines have their own set of metrics you can monitor. Even Youtube has it for videos. Pretty much anywhere you host content there is a way to track your visitors interactions. 

 

 

Analytics tells you everything about your visitors from a traffic standpoint.

  • How they got there
  • How long they stayed on a page
  • How many pages they visited
  • If they converted
  • What page they left the site from

 

This is the information you need to know to understand what visitors are doing on your website. But it isn’t all you need to know. You need to know if you are attracting the right people. If your product is age specific, like a driver’s ed course, you need to target specific age groups. Are you getting just traffic, or the right trafffic? 

But you can also learn:

  • Sex
  • Age
  • Location
  • Preferences relating to entertainment
  • Device
  • Application

All of this general information is avaioable to Google Analytics because they harvest data all the time from us. They know more about your private searches and the things you do that others might never know. They have a full record in a database all about you and the things no one else knows. 

Behavioral Analytics

Wouldn’t you just love to see what our visitors actually do on your website? Where they click, how far they scroll down your page? What if you even could get video of their visit showing their mouse travels? Yep, all of this is available and more if you are familiar with behavioral analytics and what it can do for you. But I think that one is a no brainer…

A/B Testing

How do you know if all of the hard work that was put in to create your content is the absolute best it can be? The only way to know is to test it against something else. The way you do that is through A/B testing. This is a form of testing that works with a search engine of traffic source and allows you to segregate traffic according to what they see on the page. A certain percentage, frequently 50%, will be split off to see how they react to your test. 

Tests can be a lot of different things. It can be the color of buttons. The header image. The color of text. You could even send people to completely different landing pages. But it gives you the chance to test it with a real audience.