Your website can never stand still for too long. Just as everything else in the business world, and especially the parts of the business world that exist or work online, your website should be in a state of constant change. And as a website owner, it’s your job to push for the change and to direct it. The things you want to achieve through the constant tweaking of your website are simple — you want to keep your website up-to-date, and you always want it to perform better. However, to be able to gauge any kind of improvement, you need a few ways to determine or measure how effective your website is at any point in time.
What’s an Effective Website?
A website that’s effective is a website that performs what it was made to perform. A business website is usually created to drum up business, or serve as a platform where business occurs, or promote the business and its values. Websites of businesses that are very internet-savvy can be made for much more specific purposes and campaigns.
However, if you were to boil down what makes a business website effective to a single sentence, you’d have to say that it’s the website’s ability to bring in business and affect the bottom line. As a business owner, you understand that this is the main goal of your assets. They don’t have to affect it directly, but you justify their existence by their ability to make you money. For websites to do it, they have to match certain criteria.
The Quality and Quantity of Traffic
First of all, an effective website needs to be able to attract visitors. No matter how well you design it, how awesome the content you use on it is, or how likable or useful your products or services are if no one knows about it, no one will appreciate it. And if your website isn’t able to attract traffic, no one will know about it.
But the effectiveness of a website isn’t measured only by its ability to attract traffic. Quantity is good, but quality can be even better. So, instead of looking into analytics that shows you how many visitors your website has had in the past month, you should also look into how long a person stays on a page. Or how many pages the person visits on your website. See whether they are new or repeat visitors. Check the bounce rates. These are all important measures that describe how effective your website is.
How Search Engines View Your Website
The way search engines see your website is incredibly important. In fact, it’s so important that many businesses are spending a lot of time and money on ensuring their websites are recognized as high-quality websites by search engines, and especially by Google. And that makes sense because search engines are what people use to find your website, so an effective website is a website that plays well with search engines.
There are plenty of strategies you can look into to describe not only the website’s effectiveness in being findable but also the steps you’ve made to increase it. For example, link building is a search engine optimization strategy that can improve the standing of your website with search engines. A good content strategy can do the same.
How Visitors View and Use Your Website
Finally, you can look at your website’s effectiveness in terms of providing visitors with a good user experience. If the visitors don’t have an easy time viewing your website and finding the information they need on it, your website will not be very effective. And that’s really only the beginning of providing a good user experience.
Starting with the basics means that your website needs to be mobile-friendly. And that it needs to be easy to view and navigate regardless of the device or the browser. From there, you can think about how your website falls into the overall sales or marketing strategy of your business. And how much potential it has to become a part of the customer journey. When you start thinking about cross-platform customer experience, you’ll be on a good path to drastically improve your website’s effectiveness.
