Small Business Websites

Increasing Website Performance

Written by Brenda Stokes for Gaebler Ventures

You have the website, but you have to really make it perform. There are some very crucial elements to good website performance, but you need to know what they are in order to make it happen.

You have the website and you are very excited about this fact, but what you don't have is good website performance.

Website performance is how many visitors you are receiving and how many of those visitors turn into customers. It is better for you to have 100 visitors and 5 purchases than 1000 visitors and 10 purchases. This is referred to as your "website conversion rate."

Your website conversion rate is what you want to focus on and not how many people are visiting your page. If you have 5 purchases for every 100 visitors, then you are achieving 50 purchases for every 1000 instead of 10. It is not about how many people you can attract to your site, but about how many people from your target market you can attract to your site.

When targeting your audience you are able to appeal to those that want what you are offering. If you sell fishing hooks and a person who is not looking for fishing hooks comes across your page, they are going to leave. This is one more irrelevant visit that is going to hurt your website conversion rate.

So what you need to do is make sure that those looking for fishing hooks are the individuals that come to your site. Here is how you do this:

• Utilize such tools as Google Adwords. Adwords uses keywords that are relevant to your niche. For instance, you may sell fishing hooks in New York, so the keyword "New York fishing hooks" is relevant. You can incorporate this into your ad's search criteria. You do pay for the number of hits that your ad receives, but you can limit how much is spent. Overall, your conversion rate will improve.
• Article marketing is another method. Through article marketing, you write or have someone else write articles that contain the relevant keywords so that web searchers find the article and can then be linked to your website. You are able to provide a link to your website in a resource box that is included with the article. These have to be general information articles, though, and not promotional.
• Social networking is one of the newest ways to target your audience. Now the social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace offer ad programs similar to Adwords. You can also create fan pages and groups that people voluntarily join so that you can market your website to them.
• Blogging is also an effective tool that you can use. You can connect the blog to your website, make it keyword rich so it is indexed and searchable in search engines, and market your blog so that you can drive targeted traffic to it.

These are just some of the methods that you can use when targeting your audience so that you can bring the conversion rate that your website needs. When you start to see your website conversion rate improve you will see an improvement in your profits as well.

Brenda is a graduate of California State University and a professional writer covering a variety of business topics. To learn more about Brenda, check out her website at The Digital Inkwell.

Share this article

Additional Resources for Entrepreneurs

Lists of Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms

Franchise Opportunities

Contributors

Business Glossary