SEO / SEM Blog by Search Circus

Though most marketers focus a lot of attention on traffic, site visitors alone will not make your site successful. You can improve site effectiveness by following your marketing programs through to their end results and comparing them with your expectations. It helps to think of a web site as a science experiment, complete with hypotheses. If you implement campaign A, then result B happens. By measuring your actual results against your goals you can make incremental changes to your site for greater conversion.

In order to hit your goals, you’re going to need to make a plan. Your web site should have a maximum of two or three goals. Any more and you’ll be spreading yourself too thin. For each goal you can come up with a general strategy to achieve it, comprised of highly-specific programs. You can experiment with these programs to find out what works best.

In order to come up with these programs, it’s best to take a retrospective view, as if we had already accomplished the goal, and think of ways we might have taken to get here. For instance, we start with a result, say achieving $10,000 in online sales of dog leashes in the first six months of the site. Then we think of a general strategy we might have used to accomplish that, such as informing veterinarians and kennel clubs of your product and website. Finally we think of specific programs to achieve that goal. In this case, you might ask veterinarians office if they will hand out free coupons to customers, exchanging free product for reviews, etc.

By using this funneled approach you can better evaluate the effectiveness of any program. An important point to note is that for each program, you need to put some thought into how you will measure performance. Measures will differ by program, but should be quantitative and meaningful to allow you to improve site performance.