Small Business Internet Strategies (Part I)

Are you attracting a lot of “fish” to your small business website but not catching them?

Think of your website as a fishing rod and online marketing (Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, online advertising, etc) as your bait. Online marketing attracts fish to bite your bait. But what reels them in? Leave that to page optimization or website conversion techniques.

Conversion rates vary in every industry, but typical conversion rates are between 0.5 and 8 percent, with the norm running between 0.5 and 2 percent. So, if you aren’t converting 50 percent of your traffic, don’t panic. No one is.

You can have a major impact on tracking and improving the performance, or “conversion rate” of visitors once they come to your website.

The First Step
To catching these fish is observing them. There are two key ways to watch what people do on your site. The first is to ask people (friends or family) to go to your site, and observe what they do. What do they click on? Do they have a hard time finding the links or actions you want them to take? This will help you with any potential redesigns that may be necessary in order to increase conversions.

The next priority is to create a click stream analysis. A Click stream analysis allows you to determine what pages people are finding by conducting searches (entry pages), and where they go once they visit your website, and where they leave (exit pages). Google Analytics (a free tool from Google Inc.) is critical for small website owners to use and review to look at their site statistics. This will give you a huge amount of information to determine what pages people are finding, and where they are leaving.

You can then ask yourself, “Why do they leave once they get to my services page?” Then you can research and work on improving that page.

(Look out for Part II on 8/13/09)

Joe Witte has successfully started 3 small businesses including CentricSource and Travel Ad Network.

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