Even if you have a great website, it is always a good idea to sit back once in awhile and view your website through your customer’s eyes.
What Do Your Customers Want?
Why did your customer come to your website? Perhaps there are many answers. Not everyone is looking for the same things. But do you have a reasonable idea what your most common visitor clicks on? Do you have an idea what percentage of customers are interested in some things and not others?
The simplest way to do this is to ask a sampling of your customers if they’ve ever been to your website, and if they have been, why did they go there. If you have a store or a restaurant with live customers, this question can be asked in a very informal way where you will likely get the most spontaneous and honest results.
Add Analytics
Another thing you can do to get more clarity on this issue is to add Google Analytics to your website. Google will track how many people come to your website, how long they stayed, and what pages they clicked on. They will also provide you with some nice graphs and various statistics on your website user-ship. This is not without its challenges. Data is just data, and must be interpreted. But it will give you a rough idea about what is going on.
There are, of course, more sophisticated data and click-tracking plugins out there and these can become incredibly useful as traffic volumes increase. These tools and plugins will generally cost a bit of money. But, for a fee, you can track pretty much anything.
Organization is Key
Once the Key Reasons a customer visits your website are clearly identified, it is a good idea to take a long hard review of the overall navigation and organization.
When people come to your site, do they find the information they seek on the home page? Or do they have to click through to multiple pages? What pages do they spend the most time on? What information is contained on that page? Can that information be easily moved to the Home page?
The idea is to ensure that the first thing people see when they get to your site is the answer to their question, or the reason why they came. Make it obvious. This will make them happy.
The second step would be to add some additional information they didn’t know they were looking for but is also very helpful. Keep them interested. This will increase the probability of them sharing your website with others, and returning in the future. It will also increase the likelihood of them becoming customers.
Would you like to explore different ideas for getting traffic to your site? Check out this page where we discuss more ideas about the development of your website.