Make your website work for you

How to make a website successful

Having a website is one thing and having a website that pulls in the public and new clients is totally another.

The key to an effective website is bringing a number of elements together and making sure they all work e.g.

· Make it search engine friendly
· Register your website with the major search engines
· Ensure your website looks professional and is easy to navigate
· Make sure your content is clearly laid out, concise and relevant
· Get other health websites to link to yours
· Get a good analytics package and monitor your traffic numbers and sources

Over the coming weeks we will look at each of the points in greater detail but for now here is some quick advice:

Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly?

Your website needs to be built so that search engines are able to crawl your pages, understand what you do and list you in their search results. If you website is poorly built it may block the search engines from entering your site which means you won’t appear in any search results.

If your website falls into this category then you have fallen at the first hurdle. There are loads of free tools out there that you can run your website through to highlight or report any problems. Alternatively call our technical team and we’ll be glad to have a quick look and conduct a quick ‘website health check’.

Know Your Website Statistics

As with any business you need to know:

· How many people are walking into your ‘online shop’ on a daily, weekly, monthly basis
· Where are visitors coming from? The search engines? Which ones?
· Who are your top referring websites?
· What keywords are people typing in to find you?
· What are your most popular pages?
· How many people arrive on your home page and leave (bounce) immediately?
· What is the average visitor time on your site 10 seconds or 10 minutes.

These facts and figures are crucial to grow and market your business. Supposing your most popular page is one about anxiety but no clients come to you for this. Well this probably indicates your page needs improving to convert more readers to paying clients.

Another example of how statistics can help is knowing where you visitors have come from. Supposing you have a paid listing with an internet site such as GoToSee – we provide visitor statistics so you can see:

· How many people have viewed your page in the search results
· How many people clicked in to your actual page
· How many emails have been sent from it
· How many people clicked into your website
· What is your click through rate? A low rate indicates improvements need to be made.

Having you own figures is especially important when dealing with companies who offer you no traffic figures for your advert and expect you to take their word on the amount of visitors generated by it. A quick look at your statistics may in fact cast doubt of their claims and enable you to drop your marketing spend in that particular area and spend more effectively elsewhere where you can see the results.

There are loads of statistics packages out there but without doubt the best one around is Google Analytics. It is also totally free and can be live in minutes. The package gives you every fact and figure you could ever want.

Again, if you want any help or advice regarding this feel free to pick our technical team’s brains, we’ll be glad to point you in the right direction. Just call 0208 446 2224.