Make Your Website Better

I’ve just finished teaching a class at  Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC), co-sponsored by the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, on Best Practices for Your Web Site. In the process of teaching, this recommendation became part of the list: use Google Analytics or any full-featured site traffic log tool to track what goes on at your web site.  It’s critical to know how your site is being used, so you can make changes to reflect what you learn.

Web site analytics provide data that tells you

• What keywords people have typed into Google that brought them to your site.
• What pages on your site they have visited.
• How long they spent on those pages.
• Whether your site is doing a good job in carrying out your business and marketing strategy.

Why does it matter, and how can you use analytics information? Here’s an example. Yesterday I was making a few changes to a client’s web site, innerconfidencecoaching.com.(Normally this would be confidential information, but site owner Jeannie Campanelli is very generous in sharing knowledge and I know she won’t mind.)

I looked at the Google Analytics data for the site, and noticed that the keyword “blue heron” had brought a lot of traffic. There’s a page on the site devoted to the blue heron as a totem animal. I was a bit surprised to see what is going on. Jeannie is a life coach whose specialty is in working with women who are ready to strengthen their inner confidence and create more fulfillment in their lives.

Of the many keywords that bring people to her site, “blue heron symbolism” is not one I would have thought of. But there is a possibility that the people who are interested in the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of animal totems may be good candidates for the kind of coaching Jeannie does.

However, the “bounce rate,” the percentage of visitors who come to that page and leave from that page without visiting the rest of the site, is high (x% of visitors bounce in and out of  the site on that page). That suggests that we need to make changes on the page to create more engagement for these visitors, enticing them to check out  worthwhile content elsewhere on the site.

As a start, I added a link to allow them to sign up for a newsletter. We will develop a strategy for that page designed to create an ongoing  relationship with visitors through subscriptions to Jeannie’s newsletter, and other free content that can pave the way for a coaching engagement.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, and it’s free. You sign up for an account and Google provides a snippet of tracking code that you paste into every page that you want to track. You’ll begin to see data within 24 hours of placing the code on your site. You should also submit a site map to Google, following the instructions provided on their web site

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