Can your website drive leads?
We consistently come across companies who see no real dollar value in their website. They have a site simply because, let’s face it, what legitimate company doesn’t have a website these days? We’ve seen this scenario with small businesses pulling in $500K a year to $50M companies with full scale sales and marketing departments. They post information about the company, when it was founded, who are the partners, maybe a few client logos, and a link to a contact page with a form and a phone number.
One of our major selling points to our clients is that they should be using their website for lead generation. Especially in the current economic climate, you want to tap every resource possible for new business and your website can act as a great tool for finding these opportunities.
Now, you’re probably saying, ‘yeah, yeah, I’ve heard this before. You’re a web development company, of course, you want us to believe that’.
We can accept that statement and so we’ve decided to put our money where our mouth is and use our own company as a case study of the value of proper search engine optimization and internet marketing. Here’s a list of suggestions we typically give to our clients:
- Use descriptive title tags and URLs
- Add cross-linking throughout your site
- Make contact forms and information highly visible on every page
- Implement a clean design
- Add fresh content on a weekly basis, daily if possible
- Work to procure links from other relavent websites to your website
- Implement a pay-per-click campaign run by a PPC expert
- Study your analytics and continue to tweak your site over time
So we’re starting out of the block with a few of the above already in place. We’ve got the descriptive title tags and URLs, we’ve got some cross linking going on with our tag cloud and homepage, we’ve got a clean design and our contact information is displayed prominently with a contact form on each page. Now this isn’t to say that everything is perfect. As we would suggest to our clients, we will continue to make changes over the course of this study as we review our analytics.
However, there are a few areas where we haven’t implemented our own suggestions. It’s the typical shoe maker having no shoes. Now it’s time to make a change.
The first two steps in our site upgrade are an attempt to add content on a daily basis and starting up a new pay-per-click campaign. We’ll be writing blog posts more often and adding content throughout other parts of the site as well. We’re also going to start a new PPC campaign, but we’re going to start with the typical mistake of running it ourselves. We’re a web development company right? We know a ton more about the web then the typical layman, so we should be able to run our own pay-per-click campaign. WRONG - We’ll contend that even we should be finding professional pay-per-click experts such as one of our partners, Interactive Limited. For demonstrative purposes, we’ll switch over our campaign in a month or two and measure the results. Right now, we’ll start with about $1,000 per month in ad spend and see where that gets us.
So here’s the baseline from the past month:
February 15th - March 15th
Leads: 1
Unique Visitors: 164
Pageviews: 399
Pages/Visit: 2.43
Bounce Rate: 52.44%
Avg. Time on Site: 50 secs
New Visits: 71.34%
We’ll continue to report back each month with our new statistics and findings and give evaluations of what is working and what isn’t so that you can have a more defined understanding of the power of a properly optimized website.
Tags: Case Studies, search engine optimization, SEO, web design, website maintanance, website maintenance
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