One of the major reasons I believe a webmaster or site owner has problems improving their site is simply because they do not know what to do. Have you spent countless hours searching the net for ways to improve your site? If you have, then this post is for you. Why do I say that? Because if you are one of those persons, you have been looking in the wrong spot!
The Fundamental Flaw
There are numerous website that can help you improve your site, and you may have found this one to do just that. The fundamental flaw made though is the fact that you went to my site to fix your site. The problem lies in your content, your design, and your goals. Why are you on this site? What did you expect me to say? Make your logo bigger?
The Trick to Improve Your Site
If you are here to get my analysis, then maybe you are in the right spot. The trick to improve your site does not rely on searching the web for hours for that simple fix. It’s looking at your site. It’s observing others using your site, it’s looking at analytics, it’s getting an analysis before you try to fix it. Spend twenty minutes watching two or three strangers using your site. You can gain more from those twenty minutes than you can gain from any site with web tips.
Analytic Tip to Improve Your Site
Besides looking at the best resource to fix your site, your site, the second best place is your sites analytics. I personally love Google Analytics, and here is a great little project for you to work on. It’s a great way to improve your site!
There are all sorts of ways to use Google Analytics, but a favorite of mine can give you a clear mission for the next month or so. On my dashboard I keep six items:
- Visits
- Page Views
- Pages/Visit
- Bounce Rate
- Avg. Time on Site
- New Visitors
Making sure you have at least those item on your dashboard, click on Google’s Benchmarking tool listed under visitors. After clicking the Benchmarking menu item you will see how sites similar in size to yours compares. Write those numbers down on how you compare. For example if your site gets 30% less visitors than others simply write down -30%. See table below for example.
Then, after you have written down how your site compares to others, open the category list, and pick out your category. You can find the category list near the top, underneath “Overview”. It’s a link that will expand. Write down your findings again comparing your site to others in your industry.
Now doing some simply addition you can find out your sites weakest area. By adding the percentages together, look for the top two. You now have a primary, and secondary objective for the month.
Simple example:
| Comparing | My Site Compared to Everyone | My Site Compared to My Industry | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | -30% | -5% | -35% |
| Page Views | -20% | 3% | -17% |
| Page/Visits | -45% | -15% | -60% |
So by looking at the case above it’s clear that there is plenty of room for improvement in getting more page views per visitor. You would love to see the numbers go up in the other categories as well, but first things first. Go with the main killer. It may help the other numbers as a pleasant side effect.
If you are not using Google analytics you should have some kind of analytics set up, and doing a comparison like this is still possible. It just might drag you back into searching the net for benchmarks. My advice to you, get Google Analytics running.
What Are You Working On?
Hopefully this has helped you out. I thought I would share what I am currently working on. Right now, my site is dragging in the Page Views Department. So over the next month I will be working on improving that, and will write a post about it when I start working on the next primary problem area. Hope you comment below, letting others know what you are working on!
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Hey good point, I like your idea of using benchmarking data to generate a general score for yourself to help you pinpoint which section to target. Time to run off to my analytics.
Glad you liked. Let us know what your trouble spot is for this month.
Pretty nice post. I just came across your site and wanted to say
that I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way
I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon!
nice and informative post…
A month later? Page views up 25% A huge increase, and will write a post about it after I analyze why.
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