Thursday, May 27, 2010

What Everyone Should Know About Website Statistics.

It's important to track a few key statistics on a regular basis and not get lost in the sea of numbers. What are the most important?

  1. Visitors (new and repeat)
  2. This is the number of people who have come to your website for the first time or who are coming back for a second time. This is important, because this is the size of the pool of people from which you are trying to get leads. The bigger the number of visitors, the more potential for you to get leads.

  3. Leads:
  4. This is the number of people who self-select on your website and do something to give you their contact information. It could be signing up for a demonstration, requesting a whitepaper, or viewing a video, but there must be a form where they give you at least their email address and sometimes more information as well. This number is critical since your website leads are where your sales come from.

  5. Conversion Rate:
  6. This is the percentage of your total website visitors who become a lead. So, if you had 200 visitors to your website today, and you generated 3 leads, that would be a 1.5% conversion rate. Most people will tell you that a 1-2% conversion rate is the average for a b2b website. The conversion rate is important because it is telling you how efficient your website is at turning visitors into leads. Remember, you can double your company's number of leads by either doubling your website traffic or doubling your conversion rate.

  7. Keyword Search Rank:
  8. For most business websites, the most efficient traffic and leads will come from organic search. This is the traffic that comes from people searching on Google, MSN and Yahoo and other engines and finding your website in the results. This traffic is not completely "free", since you need to work on your website to really maximize it, but it is usually much more cost effective than other sources. You need to know how you rank in the search engines for at least a few key terms related to your business, and you also want to know how that rank is changing over time - are you moving up or down - since that will determine the future success of your website visitors and leads.

  9. W3C Validation:
  10. Testing your web pages in browsers is an absolutely necessary process for building any web page. It allows you to see what others can see, and often you will notice mistakes in your HTML code because of the symptoms they cause in browsers. This often includes forgiving errors in the source code. Improperly nested elements, unclosed tags, unrecognized parameters - these are all errors in HTML code that might affect your web page's display in your favorite browser.


  11. MetaTags Analysis:
  12. Title Tags - A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Ideally, you should create a unique title for each page on your site. If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.

    Description Tags - A page's description Meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Description Meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what visitor is looking for. Description should accurately summarize the page's content.

    Keywords Tags -Always use page content/theme relevant keywords.

  13. Website Grade:
  14. The free tool at www.WebsiteGrader.com gives you an excellent overview of the marketing effectiveness of your website, including things like your Google PageRank, number of inbound links and other key statistics. What is nice about the Website Grade is that it summarizes this all into one number from 1 to 100. You should know what your website grade is and track it over time to make sure you improve (or if you already get a good score, to make sure you don't slip.

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