The Lily Pad - A Blog for Small Business Owners
7 Mistakes Website Owners Make, And How To Avoid Them (Part 7 of 7)
May 27th, 2010 | Posted in Web Design & Strategy, Web Marketing by Angela Nielsen
Mistake 7: Not reviewing your website statistics.
The most fatal mistake that a website owner can make is to not review, or even understand the performance of their website. Nearly every hosting company out there provides some sort of web analytics tool. And if they do not, Google Analytics can be added to any website and offers great information about the activity of your website.
It is important that you review these statistics every month, and compare month to month whether or not your site is improving, remaining the same, or falling behind. You should be paying special attention to the number of unique visitors to your website, how many total visits those visitors made, where they came from to find you, and where they went after they left. By knowing how many people came to your website on a monthly basis, you are more easily able to engage whether new marketing strategies are bringing more traffic to your website or not.
It is also equally important to know how many return visits each person is averaging. If you had 500 visits by 500 visitors, that tells you that nobody ever came back. If you had 500 visitors and they visited 1,500 times, then on average your visitors came back 3 times to your website. This is very important information and tells you that your visitors are making return visits on a regular basis. This takes us back to Mistake 3, and making sure you are touching your visitors multiple times. If they are coming back to your site multiple times, make sure you have fresh content to capture their interests.
Lastly, paying attention to where they came from, and where they go after visiting your website can provide a lot of valuable information. If you are paying to be listed in link directories, and that site doesn’t show up anywhere in your stats, then stop paying to be listed! If however you are thinking of cancelling a pay-for-placement arrangement but you find that the site is the number one referral source for traffic to your site, then you obviously wouldn’t want to stop that service. By knowing if they found you from a search engine, and what search engine they found you from, you can also tweak your site content and search engine strategies to take advantage of this new information.
In conclusion, no modern business today can afford to go without a website presence. With that effort, it’s vital to get the maximum return on your investment. By avoiding the top 7 mistakes listed above, you can count on your website performing far better than the majority of websites out there – the ones that caused us to compile this list in the first place!
Tagged Web Strategy, Website Content, Website Credibility, Website Design
