Is your website effective or not? Is it adding to your bottom line by bringing you new business? If the answer is “Yes” then your website is effective, if the answer is “No” then you need to find out why, and the best place to start is by gathering certain benchmarks that will indicate where the weaknesses lie.
How many unique visitors does your website get?
First and foremost, how much traffic is your website getting? A website can always do with more traffic. The question is how can you increase traffic flow to your website? In the upcoming articles we will be covering how to get a constant stream of prospects visiting your website.
Is my website indexed in Google and friends?
Before your website can show up on the first page, or even the 100th page of the search engines, it needs to be indexed. For that to happen it needs to be found and the search engines have to consider it relevant enough to add it to their list of websites. Brand new websites can sometimes take months to be found; you can speed up this process by incorporating all the optimization strategies we have been discussing in the previous articles.
If you would like to know whether your website has been indexed or not, enter site: mywebsite.com, substituting mywebsites.com with your school’s website, in the search box of any search engine. If your website shows up it means it has been found now it just needs to climb to the top!
Where do you rank in relationship to your competitors?
Once you find you are indexed, you will want to know how you are doing in relationship to your online competitors; you need to determine what your rank is. When I talk about rank I am referring to your website’s position in the search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live.
The best way to determine this is by writing down 5 to 10 key phrases you would like to be ranked high on, doing a search for them in the three main search engines and seeing what position your website comes up on. This will be the beginning of your competitor analysis and will help you focus your optimization efforts on the key phrases that need it the most.
Your website is visited by plenty of prospects, but they are not giving you their information?
Maybe your website is getting plenty of traffic but you realize your visitors are not doing what you want them to do which is give you their information. If this is the case, then you need to reevaluate your content to see whether you have a compelling message with a strong call-to-action that is motivating enough for someone to give you their contact information. Ask yourself these questions:
Am I offering something that is of value?
Do I have my value offer at the top of the page detailing its monetary worth and how they can receive this if they just fill out the form?
Is my web form on the top right hand side of my web page?
These are just some of the elements that result in successful lead gathering.
In conclusion: Benchmark gathering should be the first step in evaluating whether your website is effective or not. Based on the results, you can set targets that can be tracked and measured so you can test, evaluate and adjust as needed. In future articles we will discuss some Internet marketing strategies that will improve your benchmarks and convert your website into a student generating machine!
