Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends very much on how particularly you have defined your website goals. If you don't know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in, all your site will be is an online declaration that you are in business.
If you expect your site to kindle some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven't been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.
However, just because many people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to really do something there. It is equally important to watch the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an indispensable element of the efficacy of your website.
You may find that you need to execute some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is tremendously low. There are numerous effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly initiation a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages sooner and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or take up a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to sustain high positions.
Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. Make sure your buttons are greatly noticeable, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.
Finally, have a professional appraise the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.
