Is your website successfully gaining you leads and customers? If the answer is no, there’s a good chance your website is turning potential customers off and losing you business.
To understand website effectiveness we have to first break down the goal of a website. Although different companies may have a specific list of items they want to achieve with their website, there are a few fundamentals that all websites should aim to accomplish. The effectiveness of a company website can be measured by these three key user actions: Find, stay and convert.
Find – All websites should aim to be easily found by their ideal audience.
Stay – All websites should strive to create an environment where the audience stays on the page to gain more information.
Convert – And all websites should drive the viewer toward converting into a lead.
Each one of these three goals is accomplished by a combination of different elements of web design. We breakdown how not reaching these goals could be harmful to your marketing efforts and what can be done to help you reach them.
Find
No matter how much effort we put into making a website look great, if prospects can’t find our website everything is for naught. According to a study shared by gravitateonline, 94 percent of customers searching for services on Google select a company listed on the first page. In fact, the difference between the No. 10 spot and the No. 11 spot showed a 143 percent dip in users selecting the business listed in the No. 11 spot. So, what’s the key to securing that coveted page one listing?
Here are just a few things that can help with improving search results:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): strategic positioning of elements such as key words and meta descriptions to allow search engines to index our website easier and increase our rank in search results.
- Strategic Domain Names: Domain names should be simple and memorable. You can also use multiple domains given their availability and increase your SEO that way.
- Search Engine Ads: You can create ads with search engines such as Google and pay for them to show up on certain search result pages.
- Web Directories: Having your company name listed on well-known web directories can help findability especially for B2B companies whose target audiences are looking for their specific services.
- Social Media: Your social media presence directly ties into your search ability as well.
Stay
After your audience finds your site, the next challenge is to get them to stay. This is measured by the bounce rate and visit duration. A website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who click into a page of your website and leave the site without clicking on any of the links on that page or navigating to other pages. The visit duration is the amount of time someone stays on your website. On average, a typical user leaves a site after 30 seconds. Your goal should be to reduce the bounce rate and increase the average visit duration. Here are some tips on accomplishing this:
- Reduce the amount of textual information on key pages like the home page and about page. It’s a best practice to avoid large text blocks in general.
- Communicate value through brand elements.
- Know your audience and provide them with the information they need on the home page.
Convert
Finally, your website should be optimized to convert someone who is viewing the site into a lead. A conversion can be defined differently by different companies but ultimately a lead is an individual who takes an action beyond just viewing your website.
Some of these actions could be:
- Calling the company for more information.
- Filling out a contact form.
- Clicking on a call-to-action and providing information to download a free offer.
The conversion rate is the ultimate determinant of the effectiveness of your website from a marketing standpoint. With an inbound marketing tool such as HubSpot, conversion rates can easily be measured and analyzed to determine how well your website is doing.
If your website is falling short of reaching these fundamental goals then it could be doing more harm than good for your online presence. Fortunately, it is never too late to rebuild a new online marketing plan with a few tweaks to your website. Our free e-book “25 Website ‘Must Haves’ for Driving Traffic, Leads and Sales” can help you get started. In it you will find helpful tips and step-by-step instructions on how to give your website a face lift and build out a strategy to help your website start generating more leads.
