Posts Tagged ‘website design’

5 Ways to Make Your Website More Enticing to Customers

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Web Page CloseupWith such a fiercely competitive network of websites and blogs out there, getting your website onto the screens of your customers and keeping it there is a tough job. There are many ways in which to help your business become more popular and more profitable if you own a physical store on a high street – doing things like regular advertising, improving the appearance of your shop front, placing special offers in the window and being friendly and courteous to your customers.

Similar concepts can be explored and utilised in the online environment to help your e-business become a success:

Unique Content

Having unique content on your website is a very important thing for two reasons. One reason is that when people come to your website they don’t want to see the same thing over and over again, they want to see something new and interesting to make them want to come back. Another reason is that search engines want to see that you are constantly updating your website. This will be a factor in how they rank your website in their search results.

SEO

This brings us on to search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the art of improving websites rankings in the search engines – thereby getting more potential customers to your website – through a series of techniques such as on-site optimisation, link building and keyword analysis. By employing a sustained SEO campaign your website can be swiftly moved up the search rankings and find you more new customers.

Pictures

Having created some awesome content and optimised your site for search engines, you don’t want to scare your customers off with some poor quality, pointless photos which don’t do you or your products justice. A good photo can be the difference between a customer staying or not.

Involvement Devices

An involvement device is a tool which immediately grabs your customer’s attention as soon as they reach the site. Not just verbally, but with something they have to interact with which encourages them to stay on the page and invest their time and attention on you.

Attractive

Having a well designed site is not only important for usability, but is something which people subconsciously look for when they touch down on your website. How many times have you arrived at a webpage only to not find anything working, not know how to find out what you want and not like how anything looks? This is what you want to avoid with your site.

Have a good look at your website and really go through these important points and tick off each one that you could do with addressing, then act!

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Optimising your Site for Clientele using Google Analytics

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Your Target Customer

The most important thing for any ecommerce site is making sales, and in order to do this the site must accumulate a strong client base. Customers are websites very lifeblood; as such it is imperative that you can evaluate what your target audience is and how they interact with your site. Google Analytics can provide a concise array of details about your users, allowing you to modify your site to keep returning customers and acquire new ones. Here we will look into how using a variety of visitor details acquired by Google Analytics can assist in developing your site to maximise goal conversions.

Visitor Trending

Visitor trending provides a variety of insights into how users interact with your site, whether it be the number of total visits a day, average page views per month or time spent on your site. Through this you can determine what your sites strengths and weaknesses are. If, for example, you are receiving a high number of visits but also have an inordinately high bounce rate then there could be issue with your main landing page. High bounce rates usually indicate that your entrance pages aren’t relevant to many of your visitors. You should work to make your landing page as compelling as possible and also ensure that the pages are appropriately tailored to the keywords and ads that you are using.

Visitor Loyalty

In a nutshell, this shows how loyal your clientele are. It looks at the number of repeat visits, how recent they are and length and depth of visits. These can help to determine whether you are maintaining customers (i.e. they are returning). If customers are not returning to your site then there could be a few issues, but at least you know what needs to be done. If you also cross reference this with length and depth of visits you can see how far users are getting on your site and how long they remain on it. Through these you can determine whether your site is confusing to navigate or perhaps has a frustrating checkout system.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking allows comparisons to be made with other industry verticals. You can make comparisons of visits, page views, etc. in order determine where you are behind or ahead in the market. Through this you can determine in which areas your site is going wrong and possibly pick up useful ideas from other sites.

Map Overlay & Languages

We will discuss these two sections together, not because they have direct similarities but because of the areas in which they can assist your site. Map Overlay provides you with a very powerful tool to view globally where your site is receiving visitors from. Languages basically does what it says on the tin, by providing you with a breakdown of the various languages of the visitors to your site. These are useful together as by combining them you can gain an insight into your users, both geographically and linguistically. This allows you the option to tailor your site and keywords for more specific geographical intent (E.g. ‘car rental London’), as well as providing additional language options if you have a large client base in India for example.

Browser Capabilities

This provides details of how users are accessing your site, whether it is the browser, the operating system, screen resolution, flash versions and java that their system supports. This is extremely useful as once you have an overview of this you will know how to tune your site to suit your users. If, for example, you have a large number of users with older versions of flash and no Java support then it may be prudent to reduce these elements. Furthermore, you can modify your site to work for the browsers that the majority of your clients are using. Of course it would be best to accommodate all browsers, but in the mean time this gives you a priority list.

Once you know the problem it can usually be easily fixed. Google Analytics will provide the analysis but it is up to you to make the changes your site needs. Knowledge can be a major asset when optimising your site for success.

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