Website Testing for More Revenue
In the last year, here in Tulsa, WalMart has been moving some stuff around. Okay, they’ve moved everything around! The entire layout of the store has changed. The groceries are still on the same side and the retail remains on the left side of the store, but all of the isles are different. You could almost feel the frustration in everyone’s tone while they searched isles and couldn’t find what they were looking for.
WalMart had a reason for doing what they did — I hope! I can only imagine how much time and research dollars went into setting new goals, testing and exploring new layouts, finding which stores to use in testing, estimating how much change was required to bring about a desired end-result, and finding local contractors to do the work (some construction was involved in the WalMart by my apartment).
Most people resist change, and I understand why — in many ways I resist change, with the exception of the industry that I am in. Advancements in web design are hard to keep up with, and technology is constantly changing and improving while making our personal information less private hahaha! Since our society and the way we communicate is largely based on the Internet, social media (except for my mom) and new flashy products that are supposed to make our life easier, change is inevitable. On the flip side of that, if you resist change too long, you and your company will get left behind. Having a strategy and plan behind your change will bring about better results, instead of making changes just to keep your competitors from passing you by.
Don’t be Cheap — Hire a Professional
WalMart knows what they are good at. They are good at retail. Just because you are good at one thing doesn’t make you good at another. More often than not, it’s a waste of company and personal resources to spend man-hours on things that aren’t directly related to what you do to make the money that brings home the bacon, so to speak.
Unless you are a web designer, content developer, or SEO guru, don’t be foolish and try do the work yourself. You’ll waste time and energy pushing buttons and implementing the wrong information in the wrong way. I always recommend going with a local developer that is familiar with your local market, regardless of the industry you are promoting online. We know Tulsa pretty well. When new clients come to us, we already have a pretty good idea of what type of competition and how much of it there is. When a large Tulsa lawn care company came to us for a website for their Tulsa Christmas Lights installation services, I knew we could get them top search results easily because based on what I knew about the market along with a few keyword searches, there were no local competitors that were fighting for those keyword searches. And we did just that. Just a couple weeks after launch, they dominated local search results, and they still do 3 years later (the site is currently undergoing a new design, however). The website was instrumental in more than doubling their sales in the 2 years after launch — that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue!
What if the owner of the company thought it would be a good idea to just do an ad-words campaign simply because that’s part of their marketing campaign for lawncare? He would have thrown hundreds, even thousands of dollars away. All it took was a simple website with a little bit of SEO done to it.
Case in point: website professionals know the fastest route to your online goals — it’s what they do for a living. Trying to save money by doing it yourself or hiring your nephew to do it will come back and bite you in the keister every time.
Use Website Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool. I’m shocked at how many websites I come across that have no method for tracking visitor trends. If you are a local lawncare company and you don’t know that most of your website traffic comes from out of state, then you are spinning your wheels and will see very little come from your website.
Analytics tells you how many new and returning visitors have been on the site, where they live, how long they were on the site, what pages they looked at and for how long, whether they came from a referring site that links to your site or from a search engine, what keywords and phrases they used to find your site, what browser they used, the screen resolution on their computer, and much more. All of this information is extremely useful in determining your website’s demographic audience, as well as define the next steps on what changes to make on your site.
To reiterate about having a professional handle your online marketing and SEO, I have only found 2 clients in the last 8 years that understand the website analytics. It’s a lot of information to sift through, but again, if you don’t know what you are doing and what all of the terminology means, it might as well be in German. Hire a professional, and ask them to copy you on the Analytics reports. This will hold them accountable for doing what they promised they could do for you.
Don’t be Afraid to Do Some Test Marketing
Here are some random ideas to test to drive more traffic to your website:
- Identify your landing pages and optimize them for local search. Pick your top 2 or 3 most trafficked pages from your analytics, and optimize the snot out of them in order to drive even more traffic to them. Keep an eye on them and modify them on the fly based on what you see in the analytics. SEO isn’t touch and go; it’s ongoing.
- Hold a contest on your FaceBook page for a discount off of your service, or a weekend at a bed and breakfast. If you don’t have a FaceBook page, then start there.
- Send email blasts to your email marketing list. Don’t have a list? Here’s an idea: train your office staff to ask for email addresses from customers that call your office. We had a contest in the office one time for 30 days a year or so ago, and got over 300 emails in one month from already established customers that continue to spend money on services. On average, over 30% of the email list resulted in an up-sell service each time an email blast went out. It adds up, trust me. Well worth the money spent. By the way, we use iContact.com and prefer to stay away from Constant Contact. Just a preference, but I’ve found that iContact’s account control panel and WYSIWYG editor is more user friendly.
- Shoot some video for YouTube. You don’t even have to have expensive video equipment if you choose to do it on your own, but you definitely stand to benefit from higher website traffic if you invest some quality time and money to produce some videos about what you do and throw ’em up on YouTube. YouTube, owned by Google, is the 2nd largest search engine in the world! Why are you not in it? If you are in it, why are you not spending as much effort having a presence in it than you do for Google?
Do some local searches for your industry in Google. Do any of your competitors have YouTube videos showing up in those search results? If not, then you know what the next step is: beat them to the punch!
5. Set a 30-day budget for Google adwords and launch a campaign for 30 days to see if it generates enough leads to justify spending the money. If it does, then spend more money. Don’t know how to put an adwords campaign together? Hire a professional adwords certified web professional. Or, learn how I learned which is watching YouTube videos and reading a few books from Barnes and Noble about the subject.
In closing, don’t do nothing. Picking one of these suggestions will do more than you are doing now if you are doing nothing. Our digital world is moving forward so fast that you’ll find yourself buried under a mountain of catching up to do because someone else that lives where you live and does what you do decided to get there first. The time is now. If your current approach to online marketing was generating the sales revenue you really wanted, would you be reading my blog about how to generate more sales revenue?
