Metrics and Organization of Site Optimization Activities
One of the primary functions of the site is generating business leads. Consequently, the most appropriate metrics is the number of visitors who initiated a contact. In practice, such approach can't be used directly as a significant part of submitted forms is spam. The problem is solved by marking up the forms as either useful or spam. The number of reasonable requests is considered as a measure of the site performance. Another measure is the number of visitors form a particular geographical location directed by a search engine query based on target keywords or phrases. The correlation between the number of visitors from a target group and the number of initiated contacts is also a good measure which provides information for usability improvement. The second important function of the site is a proper business presentation, where the site serves as an online "business card". The measure of the site's popularity is the total number of site visitors. However, you can distinguish narrower groups by geographical regions. There is an opinion that you don't need to take into account "accidental" visitors (those who don't become clients). It's not true, as the total amount of visitors increases the overall brand recognition. One of the techniques to attract more site visitors is tweaking content so that it appeals to a wider audience, and promoting it in search engines for popular keywords. If the target audience and the keywords were determined correctly, the site will receive a significant flow of visitors. Any relevant content is useful – photographs, whitepapers, images, reference data, clipart, etc. It's preferable that the content is original and is created by the company's employees or business consultants. Here is a list of metrics we keep an eye on:
- Number of initiated contacts
- Number and volume of initiated sales
- Number of visitors on the pages with Web forms
- Number of target visitors
- Correlation between the number of target visitors and the number of filled forms
- Total number of visitors
- Site placement in search engine results
- Number of pages requested by crawlers of major search engines
These metrics are calculated over short and long-term periods of time to evaluate two kinds of changes: local, caused by a particular content alteration, and global, caused by a more profound phenomena. In addition, we track and analyze positions of competitors' sites in the most popular search engines.
The effects caused by these changes might be revealed with a significant time delay. This is especially true for search engine optimization. Moreover, these effects are often unpredictable. That's why even small changes to the site should be documented. For example, changing the color of a small banner can drastically affect the number of clicks. In another example a single phrase located at the top of the page can influence the position of the site in search engine results by specific keywords and thus attract a larger targeted traffic.
Management issues can affect the decision making process if the site is maintained by several people. Our practice shows that discussing the site changes in large groups delays the final decision. That’s why it's more reasonable to have decisions made in small groups of two to four people based on site statistics versus personal opinions.
Conclusion
The successful site development requires coordinated efforts of the whole team to make it not simply good, but the best in the category. Designers, authors, developers, analysts, managers – all contribute to making the site better.
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