In our first two installments of Take Your Website to the Next Level, we talked about design and messaging. In this final post, we’re going to talk about what to do after you’ve designed a clean and captivating site, created engaging and useful content, and have been up and running for a period of time. Now it’s time to find out exactly how your website has been performing and make the decisions about what to do to improve it further.

If content is king, then data is queen. 

What do you know about the traffic on your website? Do you know which pages are visited most often? Do you know how frequently visitors are returning to your site and which CTAs (Calls-To-Action) are most effective? If you’re not currently monitoring your data, you’re missing out on important information about your website visitors. Tools like Google Analytics are easy to use and available for free so you can get started right away and make the most out of your web marketing.

Once you know how most of your customers are finding your business, the better you can sharpen the messaging the customer sees when they come to your website. Discovering which keywords most resonate with your customers can inform your content. If you find that certain pages or content aren’t working, then you can begin to make changes to improve your website performance.

If at first you don’t succeed, try again.

But, what changes should you be making? What do you focus on first? Is your new idea better than your last idea?

Before you start blindly rebuilding your website, try split testing various pages and elements. Create a radical variation on your homepage and call it “Homepage-A.” Create a second “Homepage-B” that is different than your current homepage, but with mild differences and updates. Using a tool like Optimizely will allow you to have the different versions of your homepage running concurrently. A third of your audience will see the new Homepage-A, a third will see Homepage-B, and the rest will be served your old page as a control. This will allow you to test how your new ideas stack up against each other, as well as how they stack up to what was already there.

Started from the bottom, now we’re here.

Once you’ve implemented analytics and A/B testing, and become a data-ninja, you can use your new skills and insights to maximize user traffic to your website. In the last section, we’ll talk about what you can do to increase a customer’s likelihood of finding you through search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc. 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a giant ball of string. It’s complex and easy to get lost, but, there are some easy things you can do to unravel it in the right direction. You may even start seeing immediate improvements in your website’s performance.

Keywords – Keywords and phrases are information that search engines will specifically target. Let’s say you sell beaded jewelry. You have a website that shows your current stock. Someone looking for “beaded jewelry” may type words into a search engine, such as; beaded necklace, colorful earrings, fun bracelets, casual jewelry. Search engines will allow you to buy into certain keywords and in return, they rank you higher when these keywords are searched. Your initial goal may be to get in the top three pages, with the eventual goal of getting on the first page of a search term or keyword.

These keywords are words that you will want to pepper throughout your site in copy, meta-data, maybe in some headlines and page titles, and possibly even in some of your internal URLs.

If your business is ready for more advanced SEO, we highly encourage you to hire a professional. Deluxe SEO Services will direct customers to your website, get you front and center on search engines, and produce immediate results. Get started by telling them about your business.

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