Is it working?

Many of our clients have impressive websites and blogs on which they have lavished huge amounts of money, time and love. So I ask, “Is it working?”

Typically, we get an answer along the lines of: "I think so."

"And how do you measure your website's success?" No response.

In business, we measure and analyze everything. We pour over receivables and agings, we slice and dice sales data but our websites - well, we figure if they are up they must be working. Really?

Like everything else, you have to measure an activity to see what is working and to determine what needs an adjustment. Alexa.com let’s us measure traffic. If we try something new on the website and we see a spike in traffic, then we know its working. If we offer a coupon on the blog and customers redeem the coupon, then we know the campaign was a success.

Try incorporating these two tools to measure the success of you website –

• Alexa.com - let’s us measure traffic.
• Google Analytics – shows us which page designs, headlines, and graphics convert the most visitors. further, it tells us where traffic is coming from, where they go on the site and how long they stay (bounce rate).

Don’t assume because you have a website that you have traffic. As you begin to measure your progress, you’ll begin to fine tune your Internet Strategy for more traffic and ultimately more sales.

Watching the Competition

Another reason we love www.alexa.com is all the competitive analysis we can glean from the site. For those of you that don’t know, Alexa is a ranking site based solely on traffic. The more traffic you have, the higher the ranking (1 being the best).

So naturally, this would be the place to look and see what other sites are doing to help boost their traffic. Enter in one of your keywords and see what pops up. Find a popular site (ranking closest to 1) and click on site info. From you here you can find

• Sites linking in – that may also be willing to link to you.
• Related links – Other websites you may not have known about. New competition?
• Company info – The site, the contacts, etc.
• Wayback Machine - which provides insights into when the launched a new page, or updated there look or how long they’ve been around – as you know Google gives older pages more credibility.

You may be surprised what a little surfing can do. How long have they been in the business? Who do they partner with? What are their strengths and weaknesses? This information can help you anticipate your competition's next moves.