We always aim not to just keep our clients’ businesses afloat, but to help them thrive within their industry. If done right, your website will see you enjoy the kind of success that makes you cherish the day you decided to take your business online.
There’s a number of ways you can enjoy digital success, even when times are tough. Take a look at our tips below:
Be Wowed by Woocommerce
WooCommerce is a fantastic WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate your products and product categories with an online payment system. In turn, this essentially allows you to sell your products to your customers online.
It also allows you to keep track of your orders, how much each order value is, total order values per set dates, and keep track of each customer’s name and address. These features permit you to use WooCommerce as your ultimate Ecommerce hub when setting up, analysing and enjoying your website’s commercial capacity.
Analyse Your Website’s Performance
Google Analytics is a brilliant free tool you can use to evaluate your website’s performance data.
This can include the amount of traffic you receive, total returning users, percentage of customers leaving your website quickly (if high, then you know there’s an issue), amount of pages visited and much more.
You can also filter this data per page on your website and in comparison to previous dates to assess performance critically.
Keep Up With Your Keywords
Make sure to keep an eye on the keywords that you consider core to your business, and make sure they’re keywords that people are actively searching for and are simultaneously relevant to your business offerings.
There are also tools available, such as SEMrush and AHREFS, that allow you to track your competitors search engine rankings alongside your own to compare your performance against there’s.
When times are tough, they’ll be the times to utilise SEO activity more than ever.
So if you see your competitor’s rankings drop, don’t resign yourself to a similar path, work harder than ever to ensure that your keyword rankings not only do not suffer the same fate, but instead climb the rankings by spending more hours conducting SEO to use your competitor’s decreases in rankings to your own website’s advantage.
Ramp Up The Heat with Hotjar
To improve your site’s conversion rate, we recommended a tool called Hotjar to add invisible heatmaps on your website to determine which areas of the site people are interacting with most and which they are not (hot and cold areas).
Hotjar also anonymously records users’ individually experiencing your site (no personal details like names are revealed) to show you which parts of your site encourage people to convert, and which parts are lacking and lead to people leaving the site.
This data allows you to make informed changes to your website in order to help customers find what they want from your site, and for you to help them find what you want to offer them.
For example, you can make brochure downloads more visible and accessible, you can make contact options easier and better signposted — you can even change button colours and make them stand out more.
Keep Calm, and Carry on Clicking
If you want to know how many people are clicking on certain elements of your website, e.g. the “submit” button of your contact form, or how many people are clicking your email address or phone number, then you can use a tool called Google Tag Manager.
This allows you to set up variables, triggers and tags that allow you to track the clicks you deem to be most valuable on your site. It also allows you to track page time, average scroll depth and a number of other metrics.You can then integrate Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics and compare your clicks weekly, Month-on-Month or Year-on-Year to establish if your website is generating more valuable clicks as a result of your design and marketing activity.
Keep Optimising Your Site
Another great Google tool we use is called Google Optimize (note the American spelling). It allows you to test changes you’ve considered making (following your data analysis from Hotjar and Google Analytics) without permanently changing your website, and potentially making it worse.
Google Optimize allows you to test two or more variations of a page on your website, the original, and a variation that you can either make live changes to via Optimize, or a variation that you can create on WordPress to have 50% of your audience see instead of the original page.
You can tailor multiple facets of your tests on Optimize, such as how much of your audience is split percentage-wise, whether you change a small or large amount of aspects on your variation, and what kind of performance metrics you use to see a statistically significant result.
We like to use bounce rates, page views, and conversions (e.g. getting in contact or purchasing a product) as metrics to help us determine which page has performed better.
We recommend testing for at least two months and monitoring results along the way before ending your experiment.
Once you have significant results data, in relation to the metrics that you chose, you can decide whether to keep your original page, or use the variation as the new page design. If the results aren’t clear cut, you can end the test and start a new one with different, perhaps more radical changes made to your website.
Try not to test too many changes at once, at least for the first time as well. Try to test one or two changes and then build from there, otherwise you won’t be sure which change had the significant impact you were looking for.
We’re Always Here to Help
With all honesty and sincerity, we’ve seen clients achieve results beyond their highest expectations by using a few of these tips within our website design and marketing packages.
If you need assistance with any of these tips, please ask your website administrator to assist you, or give us a call on 01255 446117 and we’ll be happy to offer our support.
We love seeing people’s online ventures start from nothing and turn into something that both ourselves and clients can be proud of. We enjoy nothing more than paying back the faith people put into us by achieving outstanding results for their business online.