SEO London, Edinburgh Internet Marketing Breeze Media

Do you want more sales, more enquiries or more subscribers to your mailing list? Either way, you’re going to need a few essential tools to help you achieve your goals.

If you’re serious about getting more customers from your website then it’s essential that you know particular information such as; how many visitors you have, how they found you and where they clicked. Without this information it’s almost impossible to mesasure your successes and build upon them in the future.

The bare minimum tools you’re going to need are;

• A rank checker
• A spreadsheet
• Web analytics

Whilst these tools above will help you do a good job, there’s a couple of additional tools we strongly recommend that will take your optimisation efforts to the next level. These are;

• Web optimiser
• Click tracker (heatmap software)

Don’t worry, you can get all of these for free and we’ll provide links to these below, but first let’s briefly describe what each of them do in turn.

Rank checker

You need some form of rank checker to see where your website ranks in search engines like Google and Yahoo. These are great tools that automatically check your website against a number of key phrases and where they rank on search engines. There are a number of online web pages that do this for you but we recommend you download the the firefox browser plugin from SEOBook. Of course it’s no use without the firefox browser which is the best browser on the planet.

Spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is a great tool for comparing your rankings, your orders and your conversions on a month by month (week by week if you’re really obsessive) basis.

A couple of free spreadsheet software programs can be found at;

Google Docs
Open Office

If you have Microsoft Excel you can download our ready made SEO Rankings spreadsheet here

Website analytics

Website analytics software is brilliant for learning about your website’s visitors.It tells you lots of great information such as what key phrase they used, where they came from and what links they clicked on. There are lots of analytics packages to choose from, and you may already have analytics installed free on your web hosting, but the best free one is Google Analytics.

Website Optimiser

By making simple changes to little things and testing them over a few weeks, like titles, words or images on your website, you can increase conversions and get more customers. Sounds crazy but it’s absolutely 100% totally completely true. (It’s also really cool!) Google’s website optimiser is a software program that compares the results between two or more versions of your web page so that you can fine tune it to get more customers. Download it here

Click tracker

Click trackers are extremely valuable in telling you where your visitors are clicking on your page, but just as importantly where they don’t click. You can tell a lot from clicks on a web page and these prove to be invaluable in split tests (see above). For example if you had an advert on your web page for a special offer, a click tracker will tell you if people are clicking on it or not clicking on it. Maybe a change of colour would entice more people to click on it, maybe a different wording would. Either way you won’t know unless you test this and evaluate the results.

Click trackers generate images called “heatmaps” that show you where visitors are clicking on your web page. The hotter (redder) the area, the more people have clicked – simple as that.

There are many commercial click tracking software programs available but you can download this one for free.

So now we have all the basics covered, what do we do next?

Identify your website’s goals.

Setting out your goals, no matter what type of website you have, or what market you operate in, is the foundation for your website’s success and the good news is that there are only two types of goal you really need to think about. These are…drum roll….

1. Long term goals
2. Short term goals

Simple as that!

Setting out your goals is also really simple (it just happens to sound pompous). Here’s a few examples of some long term goals you might set for your website;

1. Get 1 million hits to your website by the end of this year
2. Get 5 orders per day by the end of this year
3. Quadruple the number of subscribers to your mailing list in the next 6 months

Your short term goals on the other hand, are probably more meaningful and can quickly tell you if you are on target or not, or were just too ambitius with your long term goal in the first place.

Short term goal monitoring and measuring is a whole lot more fun. Here’s a few examples of short term goals you could set for your web pages;

1. Send a refer a friend offer out in your next mailshot to get 30% more subscribers
2. Advertise a buy 3 for the price of 2 offer on last month’s stock products
3. Place an end of month 7 day sale on one of your products

So there you have it. You have your tools in place and your goals firmly set. You’re now ready to optimise your web pages and conquer the world!

Alternatively, if you’d like to work with a really cool company with bucket loads of expertise then move your mouse over and contact us now.