Is Traffic REALLY King?

Imagine you operate a retail shop in the main street of your town or city. At the end of each month how do you measure your performance?

It's highly unlikely to be based purely on the number of customers who entered the shop. While this statistic is important, it should surely be just one factor in determining more important metrics such as profitability trends.

Since developing one the world's first proprietary content management systems (CMS) in the 1990's, IASP has remained at the forefront of the corporate website industry by successfully anticipating market trends and investing in development of new products and services to meet future client demand.

Among the hottest issues in our business in recent times are Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing - activities designed to attract more visitors - almost every potential client we meet has search engine optimisation and marketing near the top of their list of questions and requirements (and we believe we have all the right answers in this regard).

Attracting more visitors to your website is a fundamental aspect of increasing return on investment, yet it is only one factor and alone is no guarantee of real improvement of your websites performance.

For the record IASP provides clients with access to comprehensive real-time website statistics that include vital information such as entry and exit pages, unique visitors, page views per visit, referring websites, search engine keywords and phrases used to find the website and much more.

The battle for top placing in search engines is becoming more intense every day. The cost is rising and higher rankings are becoming more difficult to achieve, accordingly, I see conversion metrics optimisation: pro-active monitoring and management focussed on conversion of a higher percentage of visitors into customers as one of the next "big things" on the Internet.

In our experience fundamental oversights can dramatically affect the conversion rate of visitors into customers.

While we reserve extensive professional advice in this regard for the exclusive benefit of IASP clients, here are three simple tips for improvement that are so often overlooked in the real world:

1: Include clear calls to action in key areas of you website.

If you sell products and services online this can be as simple as a Buy Now button, if you only publish your product catalogue online for reference purposes, include a button that offers visitors the option to Enquire about pricing.

If you don't offer visitors a clear option to take the next step, in many cases they won't: and rest assured your competitors are only one click away.

2: Make certain to repeat your key search engine advertising content in the landing page on your website.

Visitors clicking search engine advertisements expect to see a webpage that contains information relevant to the advertisement they clicked.

Expensive search engine marketing campaigns that include advertising content such as 50% off this week, which is not prominently repeated on the webpage linked from the advertisement, is akin to simply throwing money away.

3. Invest in a usability study.

While professional usability studies can be expensive (IASP's usability studies start from $8,000.00), they can also be one of the most effective ways to identify strengths and weaknesses in your website.

If you don't have the resources to invest in a professional usability study, ask some of your key clients for feedback about your website. Does it contain the information they need? Does it encourage them to visit regularly? What do they want/expect to see? Do they get lost looking for information?

As most of us know, long gone are the "good old days" when simply having a corporate website justified the exercise.

Today, with almost 10 million Australians pro-actively searching for products and services online everyday (according to BRW, April 2008), the Internet medium has seriously arrived.

If you're serious about gaining real return on your investment in a corporate website solution think about what visitors to your website expect and give it to them.

Don't be afraid to experiment: but carefully and regularly monitor key statistics and conversion metrics and make modifications as required.