Once you’ve tracked your website’s results, using simple statistical software such as AWstats or a more expensive statistical program, and once you’ve done some split testing (either manually, or using some split testing software), it’s time to start optimizing your website.
Your statistics will have shown you how many visitors your site is getting, how long they’re staying on your site and what pages they’re visiting. Split testing will have given you some idea of which colors or layouts are more effective for conversion, which headlines work best, and where your ads should be placed for optimum results, but there’s always room for improvement.
To fully optimize your website you have to start by looking at traffic. Many Internet marketers will tell you that traffic equals money. Of course, that’s only part of the equation, but no matter how well your site converts, if you’re only getting a handful of visitors a month, you’re not going to get the results you want.
Many Internet marketers start out by sending visitors to their sites using pay per click traffic (such as Google AdWords), and provided their ads are converting well (which they can determine through Google Analytics, and by a direct comparison of their earnings compared to their advertising budget) they may do quite well, but the ultimate traffic is “organic” traffic, which comes directly from the search engines, and is absolutely free. For the search engines to rank any website, they need to know exactly what that site is about, which means paying attention to the statistics relating to the keywords most often used to find your website.
If your site is about purple widgets, and many of your visitors are finding your site by searching for “problems with purple widgets” or “green and blue widgets” and you’re actually trying to sell purple widgets, then your organic search traffic may not be converting well. You may need to start optimizing your site for the specific term “purple widgets”. This doesn’t mean keyword spamming (including the words purple widgets all over your site so that your site’s content becomes gobbledegook) but it means getting more people to link to your site using the anchor text “purple widgets” and it means ensuring that all the pages of your site ultimately point to the theme of purple widgets.
Once you’ve carried out a few alterations to your site based on this knowledge, and have worked at building up good quality links to your site (backlinks) using the keywords “purple widgets” then you’re on your way to getting better organic search engine results.
Of course, you still need to consider the split testing results you did with your software. It’s almost impossible to consider every facet of your website when your are conducting split tests, but overall you should have a good idea which of two headlines converts the best, which ad layout results in the most clicks, and what offers lead to the most newsletter signups.
Work with your results. If you find that a particular page seems to be getting a lot attention and converting well, for example, then you may want to consider adding a link to that page on your homepage. So that it can easily be found by new visitors to your site.
It’s a matter of putting it all together across your entire website to ensure that each page keeps your visitors as long as possible, and each page leads your visitor to your desired goal (a sale, a click on an AdSense ad, or a new newsletter signup for example).
Once you have seen a rise in your traffic and an increase in your conversion rate it may be tempting to sit back with satisfaction in the belief that your site is as good as it could be.
Unfortunately, in the world of Internet marketing, that’s rarely the case. The tastes and expectations of Internet users change, the search engines change their algorithms, and advertising networks change their rules. What works one year doesn’t necessarily work the next. For this reason you can never stop learning and can never stop tracking your website’s results.
Your website statistics give you vital clues about what’s happening behind the scenes, and if you suddenly see a decrease in visitors searching for “purple widgets” in the search engines, then it may be time to work on a bit more external website optimization for the phrase “purple widgets”, this may mean getting more link partners, writing some more articles about your site and your product, maybe releasing a press release or two. Or maybe the market for purple widgets becomes saturated, and you need to branch out into green widgets. If you keep on top of your market, and keep monitoring and tracking your website results, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about the direction your website needs to take.
It may be that once you have one website earning a good monthly income, you want to start another. Most Internet marketers and online entrepreneurs are successful because they have a multitude of websites, each with different functions. When one website’s traffic diminishes, or buyers no longer have interest in the products offered by another, any losses are offset by gains in other areas.
Once you have a good idea as to what works and what doesn’t, it’s easier to start up that second, third or even tenth website, basing your decisions on what you’ve learned by testing your original website. Of course, each website is different, and different markets have different responses and reactions, so it’s imperative that testing and tracking your websites remains a priority for your continuing online success.
