When you invest in a website, you should ask yourself what you plan to achieve and how you are going to know when you meet your goals.
Goals
Your website investment should bring you a return. That return might be any number of things, like:
Increasing sales by x percent
Educate x percent of users
Increase customer satisfaction by x percent
Reduce customer service calls by x percent
Increase ‘word-of-month’ by x percent
Increase communication with customer and employees by x percent
When building a website, write down your goals and then decide how you are going to measure against those goals so that you know how you are doing.
Measuring
To measure your progress against your goals, you first need to write down your current levels. For example, if you want to educate 5% of your customers over the next 6-months, than write down the number of customers that you believe are currently educated. This will give you a baseline for tracking your progress.
Then, identify how you plan to collect information against your goals. You may already have a process in place, like a customer survey or the number of service calls per month. If you are planning to measure something new, then you need to find new method to measure with. Maybe an online survey or the number of new e-newsletter subscribers or the number of new visitors or the number of pages each visiting users visits. This is the type of information that your webmaster can help you measure, with tools like ‘Google Analytics’ (www.google.com/analytics/) and ‘Compete’ (www.compete.com).
E-Marketing and SEO
There are lots of ways to electronically market your website. Today, most people turn to search engines to find information on the Internet, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become so popular. SEO is the process of getting your website to show up in the first page of the results when someone searched for a product like yours.
The SEO process includes things like, summiting your website to several search engines so that they can scan your website and index the content of each page, adding Meta tags to your web pages to help the search engines identify your content, setting up online advertisements with search engine keywords that are used to direct traffic to your website.
The SEO process has become so complicated that some businesses have begun to specialize in just SEO, and website developers have begun to use these services.
Most small businesses that have a local customer base (within driving distance) don’t need to invest in SEO. Instead, they will do better by marketing their website with their existing marketing efforts, like yellow page ads, brochures, business cards, etc.