Small Business Websites - How Do You Rate the Performance of Your Website?

I was recently working with a small business owner on redesigning his website. When I redesign a website, I usually like to know what is working on the existing website, and what is not working? When answering these questions it is important to know what the number one aim of the website is. Is it to sell product? Is it to generate leads? Is it to provide information? When we know this, it is then important that we have meaningful information as to how well the website is achieving this goal. So how do we find it?

There are a number of website statistics programs out there that will provide you with information. Google analytics is very good, and it is free to use. Another one that I use is Statcounter, which has both free and paid options. Make sure that you get more than just a hit counter that registers a hit every time a page is opened. And make sure that you have the ability to exclude certain computers from registering as traffic to your website. When I design a website for a small business I exclude the computers that access the internet at the business, I exclude home computer of the small business owner or owners, and I exclude my computer. We want to know how many times a potential customer looks at your website, not how many times you look at it.

If your website is designed to sell product there are some important statistics that I like to look at -

How many times do the product pages get opened relatively to the landing page?
How many times does a product get sold when someone lands on a product page?
What product pages get opened the most and which ones get opened the least?
What pages do people most often leave the site from?
What keywords generate the best sales conversion?
What geographical areas generate the best sales conversion?
What advertising and promotion generate the best sales conversion?
If your website is designed to generate leads you can ask similar questions in relation to lead generation.

If your website is designed to provide information to your customers then I like to ask the following questions.

How many pageloads per visitor to your site?
What page do people most frequently leave from?
What keywords are people searching for to find the website?
What are the most popular and least popular pages?
What page do people most commonly land on?
When I work with a small business owner to redesign their website the two most important things that I like to know is how well your website does achieve your goal? That is how many sales do you get per visitor, or how many leads do you get per visitor? The next thing that I like to know is what page do people most frequently leave the site from? If you have a page that has a particularly high 'bounce rate' then this is one of the first pages to look at with your website. There are many reasons why people leave your website - maybe you are targeting the wrong traffic, so you are getting the wrong type of customer. Maybe the website does not seem to provide what they are looking for. Maybe the website is too hard to find what they are looking for.

It does take time to get meaningful data about a website performance. If you have meaningful data already then that helps. Once we have meaningful data then the process of testing begins to find what works and what does not work. There are many factors on a page to test, including layout, navigation, wording, the shopping cart, and many more. One of the most successful ways to improve your website is to mimic websites that are already successful. Have a look at websites like Amazon, Google, and eBay and look at their layouts, navigation and wording and this can help you get ideas. These websites are always testing and retesting to find ways to do things better. Why not use their research as well.

I am a freelance website designer providing professional website design services to small businesses. Visit my website if you would like more information about my professional website design services. I also redesign small business websites. My skills include HTML and CSS design, graphic design, and search engine optimisation.

by Stephen K Hall - 1 Jan. 2009

Back to Top

###

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stephen_K_Hall