Underperforming sites

By Clare Lawrence
Posted Thursday, October 7, 2004

Maybe you prepared it in-house or used a third party to produce it. You not happy with it and are not sure what to do? You’re not alone!

Businesses of all sizes are disappointed with their websites.

Often the reasons are a failure to understand what to do with the site. If your site is a marketing tool, and most are, it should complement your existing marketing.

This article covers a few of the main issues you need to identify and address to overcome your sites issues.

1) What are you trying to achieve?
a. The number of enquires you want
b. Sales to existing customers?
c. Improvement to service levels
d. Better information availability to customers
e. Product Feedback
f. Staff recruitment
g. Cost reductions
h. Image

2) Identify strengthens and weaknesses
a. What does the current site achieve?
b. Can we monitor the current performance e.g. site statistics
c. What are our competitors doing?
d. Do we have new ideas to incorporate?

Which often comes down to: -
How many visitors is the site seeing?
Where are they coming from?
How many of these visitors are converting to sales?
Statistics from the website logs ought to answer these question and at least give an indication of the source of the traffic. If your not getting the statistics you need then consider our hosting solution, which provides these for you.

3) Website marketing
Who are your target audience?
What content do you need to have on your site to attract them?
Is it there?
Do they come back?
What could attract them back?
How should you promote you site to your target audience?

The answers to all these questions will vary much depend on your business and target audience. Here are some approaches that may consider: -
o Try to draw visitors to your site: give advice, publish articles, give good deals, and offer support. Have a look at our article bank to give you some ideas.
o Add your web address to all your letterheads, business cards adverts etc
o Use the search engines up 75% of traffic can come through Search engines If your sites not listed in the main search engines its possible to purchase” paid inclusion”, these services are not very expensive and also offer a much more rapid inclusion, typically 48 hours.

Discount Domains offers paid inclusions packages via our site: (http://www.discountdomainsuk.com)

o Add links from third party sites, these bring direct traffic and increase your sites ranking, particularly with Goggle, the leading Search engine. The correct use of links can potentially transform your sites ranking. Have a look at the following articles.

How to use links (http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/28)

Link popularity (http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/158)

o Pay per click – as the name suggests, this drives traffic with a payment for each visitor. We recommend the services of Espotting who offer paid placement on Yahoo
o o Domain name marketing, this involves having multiple domain names giving potentially multiple index entries. Take care that the content hosted on each domain is unique as the Search engines normally exclude identical or substantial identical content.

We provide one of the best value domain name registration service around.

o Affiliates schemes – these pay a commission, based on sales
o On-line advertising – the same concept as offline
Sounds expensive? It doesn’t have to be, all the above can be achieved on a budget.
Key things to remember
o Set your objectives – decide what do you want to achieve
o Identify your strengths and weaknesses
o Try to make your site a magnet for your target audience
o Use your web site as an integral part of your offline marketing
o Don’t forget marketing - especially search engine marketing

If your looking for help with your website, we have a number of partner web designers who offer good value services.

Have a look at the following sites: -
(http://www.etailored.co.uk/)
(http://www.bridportwebdesign.com/)
(http://www.wdstudio.co.uk/)

About the Author
Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd – A leading UK provider of Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to (http://www.discountdomainsuk.com) Clare can also be contacted on Clare@discountdomainsuk.com.