Getting Site Visitors and Measuring the Results
Many people will talk about how many hits their web site gets. Some even have that old deplorable hit counter on the bottom in public view. If you see one of these hit the F5 button a few times and watch the counter click over, it will make the owner happy. But did does it actually mean anything? Did they receive any value from the click?
The term hits is almost worthless, what you are really interested in is visitors, targeted traffic, traffic that results in a sale or an inquiry. If you have never seen your site statistics now is the time to take a look. If you don’t know how to, call your web developer or look at your hosting companies support section, there should be some information on how to access your statistics.
Now if this all makes no sense then get help. A good web developer can expalin how all this works. Investigate Google Analytics, this is an excellent free service though you may need your web developer to “tag” the pages for you.
Google should be your number one target, it currently delivers over 90% of the search requests in Australia. Make sure Google knows you are an Australian site, particularly if you are targeting Australians only. Look at how many bounces there are. These are visitors that look at one page and leave, a bounce is a potentially worthless visit. Were they from locations that you service?
So how do you get targeted visitors there? Number one, put your domain name on everything you write, sell and do? If you don’t tell people you have a web site they may never look. Make sure your web pages are optimised for your target market.
Talk to your web developer, if the don’t offer web site optimisation then shop around for someone who does. Look for site optimisation companies that deliver a result that still looks good the the human eye. Many extremely well optimised sites that rank well with search engines are so people unfriendly they still deliver no real results for the owner of the site.
Remember, if you don’t know how, get help! Successful business people enlist the aid of experts and focus on what they do best. Finally remember your stats are your business, so don’t advertise them to your competitors.