Ensuring your website is working for you

Are you confused as to why your website isn’t getting you business? Are the hits low? Or do you even know what traffic volumes you are getting?

If you can’t answer any of the above then you could probably do with some help, but before you go charging off into the sunset looking for answers – what do you need to know and where are the trustworthy places to look?

Keyword Analysis

Well if you don’t want to pay someone to look over your site and give you some insightful SEO (search engine optimisation) tips then you can do some of the legwork yourself.

One thing that an SEO specialist should look at is the keywords on your site – basically; what Google looks at to decide what your website is about!

Now keywords are your target phrases, they are the terms that relate to your business, your location, your services and your products. They are the things you want people to find you under. So, if you’re a printers based in Chelmsford for example, you’d hope that someone typing in “printers Chelmsford” into Google will find your website – this isn’t always the case however, but it should be.

What you need to do first is understand what your current keyword count through your site is and therefore, what search engines are going to pick up. A great place to find out what your website’s keywords are being picked up is SEO book, which has a FREE keyword tool. Simply type in your website address and hit go! It will pull out a detailed report on your keywords which you can export out if you want. It will tell you what the most commonly repeated one, two and three word phrases on your site.

Never fear, it is smart enough to ignore words like “the” and “and” and other adverbs, pronouns and determiners. These clearly are not part of your keyword makeup.

Traffic Analysis

The next thing you really ought to be doing is keeping an eye on your Google Analytics which is another FREE tool for helping you manage your website. Sadly, you will need a web developer to help you set it up – unless you’re reasonably comfortable with the code on your site.

But the Google Analytics tool is BRILLIANT, and we can’t stress that enough! The data and insights you can get into your website’s traffic and the behaviour of its visitors is unrivalled and is completely invaluable to the future success of your website. Any web developer worth their salt will always recommend setting this up when they build your site – if they don’t you should tell them you want it!

Google Analytics provides in-depth data on the following and much more besides:

Where your traffic is coming from – organic searches, social media, referral links etc?
What keywords they found you under – so what they searched to find you?
How long they spent on your site?
What pages they visited?
How long they spent on each page?
What they clicked on and on what page?
What countries your website visitors are in?
A “Behaviour flow” is an amazing visual tool showing you the paths your visitors are taking through your site and where they are leaving!
And LOADS more!

If you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, then let us know and we’ll set them up for you – Why? Because you need them – you might not realise it, but you do!

A Quick Test

Most often what will happen is; someone (you for example) looking for your own website, to find out where it is raking, will Google your company name and smile happily when it appears pretty much bang-top of Google.

But stop – think for a moment – put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t know your business name, or even that you exist – are they going to be Googling your business name? No, they aren’t.

So, if you are a bespoke upholstery company in Tunbridge Wells, then what you need to be doing is Googling “bespoke upholstery Tunbridge Wells” – not coming up on page 1? Now you need to start looking into why.

Pitfall warning

If you repeatedly do this; search for your keyword terms and scroll through to find your own website, even if it is on page 3 or 4, or even lower to find your site.

You will start to notice that your website seems to start coming higher and higher in the rankings.

This is because Google is trying to be helpful, it’s learning what you’re looking for and moving it for you to make it easier to find. You’re not seeing the results that other people are seeing. Be warned!

For 94% of people the world ends at the bottom of page 1 of Google. They don’t look further – if they don’t see what they want on page 1, they go back to the top and type something else in.

We have written another article on SEO Tips and things to look for throughout your website that will all help toward your Google ranking. Have a read and if we can help further, please get in touch.

Your website can achieve so much more if you take control of these elements, understand it, learn how it works and learn what is having the right impact and what isn’t. Once you have got a good picture of this you can start to make positive impacts on your results and start to make your website more than just an online brochure.

It can become a genuine lead generator for you, really making a big impact and bringing new business through the door all the time