Ed Rivis is the UKs leading web marketing expert for small business owners looking to use the web to dramatically increase sales and maximise profits. He spoke with Jonathan Jay about what business owners can do to ensure their websites attract more visitors, more leads, and more customers.
Jonathan Jay: What can a business owner do to improve the effectiveness of their website preferably without spending any more money?
Ed Rivis: The conversion rate is one of the most critical statistics that people should be tracking. To do that you need to know how many visitors your web pages are attracting. A great piece of free software called Google Analytics lets you install code to each page to track how many people are visiting your website.
Lets say you are a business to business service company and you want a website simply to generate a hot sales lead or inquiry that your telesales team can then follow up. You have 100 visitors over the next seven days and if you have one inquiry then that would be a 1 % conversion rate. In other words, from 100 unique visitors (not hits) you get one enquiry which means you have a 1 % conversion rate. With that information, you can start to optimize your website: you can change pages and do things that you hope will improve it and then you can track whether the conversion rate actually increases over the following seven days... you could have 100 unique visitors and 10 enquiries then you have obviously made a very good change to your website and you can start to get feedback on how your website is helping your company.
Jonathan Jay: What sort of changes could people make to their website?
Ed Rivis: Find ways to capture and keep the attention and interest of their website visitors.
One of the biggest mistakes most websites make is making the brand the star of the website. The first thing visitors see is a corporate logo that takes up two thirds of the page. It might be animated with the message Welcome to our website and there might be some text saying how long they have been in business. There might be a telephone number... but at that point, the visitor has no reason to stay on the page. The website has not captured their interest.
If the brand is the star of the website they will just hit the back button on the browser. In fact, tests have shown that the back button is one of the most used features on a web browser.
When somebody lands on your website you need to keep them on the page and hold their attention. Two of the best ways to do that is to add compelling attention grabbing headlines and pictures of peoples faces or some sort of relevant image (not the brand or logo).
The speed at which the page loads is another critical factor. If the page takes quite a long time to load because there is a very large image on the page then people will click away. People have a very short attention span you have three seconds or less to capture their attention. Make sure every page on your website loads quickly.
Author Resource:-
Strategies like that can explode your small business quickly, that's why I'd suggest you go right now to http://www.freemarketingbook.org and request a copy of Jonathan Jay's new book "Marketing Secrets of a Multi-Millionaire Entrepreneur"
Copyright SuccessTrack 2009
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