I wrote recently about the changed role of the homepage: Traditionally people think of the homepage as the ‘entrance’ to the website, whereas it’s now more like a central atrium / hallway. Just as that has changed, the old role of the homepage has been picked up across the rest of the website…
I’ve been involved in a few new-website projects that have begun with a ‘benchmarking’ exercise. These often consist of a big spreadsheet with a list of competitors across the top & a list of ‘site features’ down the side. The idea is usually to then take *all* of those features & stuff them into the new website.
Here’s what’s wrong with that…
If you’re thinking about redesigning your website, here’s a simple list of three things to improve your chances of success:
What are you trying to achieve in this redesign? Do you have an objective in mind? Is there one particular problem you need to fix?
Are you going to survey users before/after? Will you use web analytics to measure the response to your redesign? Have you decided on which KPIs to track? (eg. number of pages visited, purchases per hundred visitors, time on site, number of visits per week per visitor, etc).
This is the biggest contributor to success: Make sure everyone involved in the redesign knows exactly why you’re going through this process. Tell them what you’re trying to achieve & why you’re trying to achieve it. It may all be obvious to you, but if your copywriter/designer/programmer/sales team/boss/business partner do not understand exactly what you’re aiming for, you’ve dramatically lowered your chances of success.
If your website includes any kind of buying mechanism, you’ve probably thought a little bit about ‘abandonment’. ‘Abandonment’ (sometimes called ‘an abandoned cart’) is when a potential buyer leaves your site without completing a transaction: ie. they added something to their basket, but they didn’t check out.
One way of looking at a basic e-commerce sale is to break it down into four steps:
If a potential customer ‘abandons’ on your site, it means you’ve managed to get them past steps 1, 2 & 3: You’ve found a visitor who is happy with your product & comfortable enough on your site to think seriously about making a purchase.
When, between stages 3 & 4, your visitor decides not to buy, one of two things could have happened:
There will always be abandonments caused by the first group of visitors & that is nothing to worry about. But, if you can figure out what happened (or didn’t happen) to cause the second group of visitors to give up, you could gain extra sales & therefore make more money.
Here’s a simple four-step plan to tackle abandonment on your site:
One very common measure of website success is traffic: Greater traffic equals greater success. You can see just how common this idea is when you think of some of the more widely quoted web metrics:
Yet, unless you’ve already done so, putting some work into your website’s ‘conversion rate’ (its ability to turn a visitor into a customer) is usually more rewarding. Here’s a quick example that proves the point:
As you can see, with 500 visitors & a 3% conversion rate, a site can be much better off than one that gets 1000 visitors & only converts 1% of those into customers.
Conversion rate doesn’t have to be visitors:orders, here are a few other ideas:
What’s your current overall site conversion rate? Are you tracking it individually for key pages? Are you tracking it over time?
Small Businesses (at least those that don’t totally revolve around the internet) generally have two thoughts when it comes to the web:
You may need one or both of those, but, before spending a lot of time and money to get there, it’s a good idea to ask why you need them. Why do you need a website? A website (just like a top google ranking for any particular keyword) is really just a ‘means to an end’. Yet each of these is often treated as an end in itself. Businesses are often happy to spend a lot of money on a website without much consideration of the return they’re likely to see, or how it benefits them.
Before you jump into the process of putting a website together (or making changes to your current site), it’s important to work out how you can benefit. Unless you are fully clear on the end result you’re trying to achieve, you risk (at best) not achieving your potential and (at worst) wasting a lot of money on something that doesn’t really help you at all.
Before spending time and money on your website, try to answer these questions:
In the UK, Google offers two different search options:
The second option is a subset of Google’s index, showing only pages that Google thinks are in the UK.
If you’re a UK company that doesn’t appear in the ‘pages from the UK’ index, you could be missing out on 30% or more of your potential traffic. This can be costly to your business, and can confuse both current & potential visitors, so knowing how to make sure Google thinks you’re in the UK can be quite important. Here are the three ways to make sure your page appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Hosting your site on a .uk domain name is the simplest way to ensure you’ll be in the ‘pages from the UK’ index. There are currently 13 UK ‘secondary level domains’ to choose from (.co.uk, .me.uk, .org.uk, .ltd.uk, .plc.uk, .net.uk, .sch.uk, .ac.uk, .gov.uk, .nhs.uk, .police.uk, .mod.uk, .mil.uk). Hosting your site on any of these (for example yoursite.co.uk) will work just fine. Of the domains available to the general public (ie. excluding .ac.uk, .gov.uk, etc) .co.uk is by far the most familiar to the UK’s population & is the defacto standard.
It’s worth noting that anyone can buy a .uk domain name whether they are a UK resident or not
Pros of using .uk domain names to appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Cons:
Even if you have a non-UK-specific address (eg. yoursite.com) you can still appear in the ‘pages from the UK’ index by hosting your site on a UK IP address (ie. putting your site on a server within the United Kingdom).
Pros of hosting your site in the UK to appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Cons:
Though I would never recommend ignoring the previous two options & relying solely on this, if you’re in a position where you are simply unable to either buy a .uk address or host in the UK, purchasing AdWords ads is a simple option to ensure you’re visible in the UK.
Pros of using AdWords ads to appear in ‘pages from the UK’:
Cons:
While there are hundreds of ways to market yourself and your organisation online, search marketing is one of the most powerful. Understanding exactly why it is so powerful and the unique benefits it can offer you are two of the keys to success in search. Here’s a breakdown of three key benefits to make use of in your online marketing strategy.
To be successful in almost every marketing medium, you have to actively research, target & find your prospective customers. This can be a laborious, costly, hit and miss process. With search engines, this process is entirely the opposite: Your customer is working hard to find YOU. A nice metaphor for this is recruitment: In most marketing media, you have to go out & scour the job boards looking for work. You have to tailor your CV, put together a perfectly pitched covering letter & then hope. With search, it’s like receiving a headhunter’s call out of the blue. You are exactly the candidate they’re looking for & they’d like you to come over for an interview.
While most tactics have an impact on either your ability to gain new customers, or on your ability to keep existing customers, a clever search campaign can achieve both.
Search For Acquisition:
There’s no better way of acquiring a customer than to have a search engine they trust return the most relevant page on your site as the top result. If your site is good enough to follow that through, it immediately makes you appear to be the greatest authority & the logical choice.
Search For Retention:
Though it’s often overlooked, search can act as a fantastic tool for retaining customers. Many companies focus on email as their sole retention tactic: keeping customers warm & up to date with news, reinforcing share of mind & often gathering data on when the customer is next thinking about purchasing. If your site ranks closely to your customer’s search interests, with language relevant to them, your site can appear frequently in their search results. This keeps them warm to your brand, brings them back to your site without intervention & can put you at the top of their mind when they next need something you provide.
Passive Income is something every entrepreneur seeks: removing the direct tie between your effort & your reward; the ability to make money while you sleep. While email marketing, pay-per-click, affiliate, online advertising, blogging & most other online marketing tactics (as well as offline tactics) all require you to constantly supply a flow of money or effort, search marketing need not.
Set up a highly relevant, highly linkable site, set the ball rolling firmly, and you can achieve ongoing results without any ongoing effort. Whether your site is a photography portfolio, a religous forum, a multinational business, or indeed anything else, building this principle into your strategy can be used to your long-term advantage.
When designing (or redesigning) a homepage, there are many traps to fall into – from concentrating entirely on the ‘look’ of the page, to simply repeating the mistakes of your previous attempt.
A successful homepage is one that gives you the best possible chance of achieiving your objectives. This article offers a checklist of six tasks that every successful homepage should perform.
Whether you’re pitching at a single audience, or several distinct groups, it’s important to make sure each of your visitors has an entry point to the content they’re looking for. For example, a small record label might be targetting music buyers, potential artists, distributors & ad agencies. Make sure visitors from each of those segments can reach the content most applicable to them via the homepage. A great example of this is ICI, whose homepage clearly targets Journalists, Analysts, different Investor groups, as well as general browsers & offers each a clear entry into the path most applicable to them.
If a visitor who’s never heard of you or your company dropped onto your homepage, would they be able to figure out the answer to the question “What do you do?” There are occasions when it doesn’t matter whether visitors can figure out what you’re about, but those are few and far between. Even if it’s just an ‘About Us’ link, you should offer a simple way for new visitors to figure out what you do.
What do you want your customers to think of you? What image do you want to project? Your website is one of the best, easiest places to put on exactly the face you want in front of customers/potential customers. For the same reasons you’d want your ideal photograph to appear next to your name in a newspaper, you should aim to make the best impression possible via your homepage.
As well as guiding your visitors to the content they want to see, it’s important for you to guide visitors toward the content you want them to visit. This doesn’t mean fill your homepage self-indulgent nonsense, but rather: If there are a few golden items that you could show to your visitors, and showing those to your visitors would significantly benefit you or your organisation, make sure that those are easily reachable either on or from the homepage.
The objective of a website is usually to ‘sell’ something, this could be services, products, opinions, events, advertising, ideas, or people, & it may or may not involve any financial transaction. Whatever you are selling, it is beneficial to gain as many chances as possible to do that. The easiest way to do that is to provide reasons for people to visit, revisit and recommend your site to others. There are many ways to do this, for example you may seek to become a resource on your chosen topic, you may offer tools that your target audience would use over and over again, or you may simply offer highly relevant, frequently updated content. However you choose to do this, your homepage is the page you can guarantee people will look at & is the best place to advertise this ‘killer’ content.
Whether it’s on their terms via something like RSS, or on your terms via email/telephone or post, asking your visitors for permission to speak to them again puts you much closer to achieving your objectives than just relying on them to return of their own accord. If you do choose to go the email/telephone/postal route, ensure that you make it as simple as possible for visitors to provide their details, and reassure them that you will not abuse their details.
Whether you’re already using web analytics, or you’re just about to start delving into it, there’s one key thing you should know to hugely increase your chances of success.
You won’t find many successful companies or website owners who don’t keep an eye on their stats. Having worked with a few of these companies, and talked to a lot of website owners I think the difference between success & failure with Web Analytics boils down to one ridiculously simple, often overlooked question.
Okay that sounds overly simplistic, but it’s a question that’s often totally forgotten about: Somebody came up with the idea that you needed a website. Maybe that somebody was you &, either at the time you first put it together, or in between that time and now, the central purpose of the website has lost focus & you’ve drifted into a routine. Or, perhaps, you do know what the website is supposed to do, but that goal is a list of 50 different things swimming around in your head.
This ‘success’ could be a single goal at a Macro level (eg: “Earn Enough To Pay Off The Mortgage”), or it could be a series of goals at Micro levels (eg: “Double Our Google Traffic”, “Make 30 Affiliate Sales Each Day”), or anything in between. But, unless you have these clear goals, you have nothing to shoot at and, thus, the numbers you’re looking at in your analytics tool won’t move you any closer.
Each of those is a fairly simple thing to aim for but, without deciding that that is what you’re aiming for, your web analytics is more or less useless: you just flounder about checking to see how many page views you had on monday, or how many visitors you had from Venezuela.
Once you have those goals in mind, you can stop wasting time looking at meaningless numbers & focus your web analytics work on the numbers that really are going to move you closer to actual success.
