Is your site ready for traffic?

You may have had your company website for a while and it has been neglected or maybe you have just launched your first company website. Whatever your position, and before you go and spend lots of money on a marketing campaign – you need to ensure that your website is working as it should do. Check out the following …

Testing, Testing

Firstly, do all of your hyperlinks and site forms work?   Get someone outside of the office to check, or do this yourself from home.  If you do it from your office PC, the results you see may be cached old content – meaning you are not seeing the very latest version of your site. Follow all the links to make sure they go to the right place or that forms generate emails or enquiries as required.

There is nothing worse than you thinking your site is not working for you, yet you have lots of enquiries that are just not reaching you. We have seen this a few times and it is always the first thing we check with new clients.

So once you are sure everything works technically, you need to see if it works for your users. There are plenty of analytics tools that allow you to “see” what your users are doing on your site.  This is valuable as it will show you want they do, and it may not be what you expect.

What are they doing?

You can get very wrapped up in a design process and getting a website ready in a way that you think you know what users will do.  But invariably this won’t happen.  They will:

  • try and click on things that are not clickable; and / or
  • navigate or totally miss the elements you want them to see.

So again, make sure you commit some time to this kind of analysis.  You want to make it as easy as possible to users to transact with you.

Services such as Google Analytics and CrazyEgg will show you what people are doing.

One quick way to test a site quickly is to setup a small pay per click test.  Spend some money and drive a few hundred visitors to your site and see what they do in a short period of time.  Then you can fix things before working on a more expensive budget plan.

Summary

Getting your website built and live is a great achievement but it is also just as important to maximise the site ability to do what it needs to.  Checking the site and testing will mean that you stand a much better chance of your site working for you – and this means it being profitable.

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