Websites which work !

Édition : Mulhouse/Sud-Alsace - 18 avril 2012

Ce mois-ci, les conseils du Directeur Commercial de Vistaprint, Tristan Money, pour améliorer la visibilité et donc la performance d’un site web.

Le périscope, journal économique de Mulhouse et environs, actualité économique alsace | les chroniques de Sarah Lesage

According to the Wordlwidewebsize.com, the Indexed Web contains at least 8.02 billion pages (April, 2012). How do you make your website stand out and more importantly, drive business to your company? Vistaprint Senior Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, Tristan Money, offers some basic pointers.

The key is a clear, easy to navigate site which clearly communicates the company’s unique selling proposition (USP). One of the biggest barriers to purchasing online is trust. Look for ways to instill confidence with your visitors. Customer testimonials, a physical address, or trust seals are just a few examples. Whether you want your customers to buy, to register, or to contact you, make the process as easy and friction free as possible. But the website alone will not bring success : You need to drive qualified traffic to your site. While there are many online channels to accomplish this such as search engine marketing, email marketing, social etc., make sure you market your website across all customer touch points: Whether it be print advertising, flyers, business cards, your products – all of these things will contribute to generating qualified traffic to your website.

Le Périscope, journal économique de Mulhouse et environs | Tristan Money, Vistaprint

Tristan Money, Vistaprint

Google Adwords and Organic Search should work hand-in-hand

One of the most significant means of driving qualified traffic to your website is through Search Engine Marketing. Google Adwords is a pay-per-click program that allows you to display your advertisement in Google search based on very specific search queries that relate to your business. It’s an open bidding system whereby results can be immediate, but as you pay per click, you need to ensure that you are bidding for the most relevant search queries for optimal return on investment. Organic search is free. Here you need to ensure that your site is structured in a way that allows the search engines to crawl your site, while maintaining customer friendly navigation.

Google rewards relevancy, so ensure that your site content and meta-tags are well thought through, and most relevant to your business. While Organic search is free, don’t expect results to be immediate. Providing the site is well optimized, it requires patience in gaining first page position.

How to measure a website’s performance

Critical to your website’s success is understanding the trends and customer behavior on your site. Google Analytics is one such tool (and it’s free!), that allows you to measure traffic trends, where people are coming from and where they’re dropping off. It also allows you to understand which search queries are most relevant, which queries result in high bounce rate (people abandoning after the first page visit), average time spent on the site and much more. These insights can be leveraged to make continual improvements to your website to increase performance, as well as adapting your search engine marketing strategy.

These are just a couple of tips to get a website up and running but more importantly to ensure that it starts working for you immediately and that you see a return on your investment.

Sarah Lesage, formatrice et rédactrice en anglais – saklesage@gmail.com, 06 15 28 43 48

Pointers : Des indications
Instill confidence : Créer la confiance
Trust seals : labels (de l’industrie ou de sécurité par exemple)
Bidding system : Système d’enchères
Crawl your site : Indexer les données de votre site
Dropping off : Quitter