Ask yourself these five questions - the answers contain opportunities for more business!

1. How many visitors do I get?

This is one of the most important pieces of information you have.

The 'conversion rate' (how many people take the action you want) for web marketing starts at around 3%, so if you want one contact a day from your website, your starting visitor number goal should be 30 a day. If you are getting a good number of visitors, you could decide to focus on increasing the number that contact you, make a purchase or sign up for your newsletter.

If you know how many visits your site gets, then you know whether to focus your marketing efforts on getting more visitors or increasing the conversion rate. This will mean more bang for your marketing buck!

1. Where are they coming from?

   Your web reporting tool should break down your visitors into three sources:

   • Direct visits
   • Referral sites
   • Search engines (eg Google)

   Direct visits are those people who have you book marked or type your website address directly into their browser. So these people already 'know' you or have been referred to you. An indication of repeat customers or referral business at work

   Referral sites. This shows your back-links in action. It will tell you how many of your visitors came from yellow pages, Finda, Facebook and other sites you have links on.

   Search engines. We all know that people turn to the search engines first to find what they're looking for, so this is an important statistic. People coming to your site from Google etc are likely to be your 'new' business prospects. You'll have to weed out the people that searched for you by name.

   You want to increase the number of visitors that come from the search engines (first) and referral sites (second) as this most likely represents new business for you.

2. What keywords are they using?

   Keywords and phrases are critical. You have to know what words your visitors are using to find you. Make sure those words are in your content so you are giving them what they are looking for.

   If you have an Ad Words account, you can also research other keywords to use and how many people search for those words. For example if you sell air conditioners, you could find out that there are an average of 12,100 searches for "air conditioning" each month (in New Zealand). And that there were 14,88 for "cooling" and 22,200 for "heat pump". You can then make sure all those phrases are used in your content, your tags etc.

3. What is my most popular content?

   Which pages are doing all the work for you? Which ones are a waste of real estate? Apart from keywords, the popular content tells you what people are interested in, so you can make sure that content is as compelling and persuasive as possible.

   Don't spend time tweaking the content that no one is looking at!

4. What's my conversion rate?

   You need to know how many of the visits to your site are converting to a sale. This can be tricky, because sometimes people might visit you several times before filling in a contact form, calling you or making an online purchase.

   Measuring conversion rates can be hard. If you want people to contact you, and your website has your phone number or email address details in the header or footer for example, it is visible from anywhere in the site. This means that you don't know what visitors were looking at or which page resulted in a decision to contact you.

   In these situations, we recommend at the minimum a unique phone number that is only published on the website, so its possible to get clear referral numbers. Unfortunately many businesses (especially small) are understandably reluctant to spend the extra money.

5. Bonus question: What's my bounce rate?

   This measure is very useful for improving your site's performance.

   The bounce rate is the number of visitors that land on a site or page and leave again straight away.

   So if a particular page gets 60 visits, and has a 75% bounce rate, it means that 60 people landed on that page (ie came into your site on that page) and 45 of them left again straight away. Unless it's a campaign and call to action on a single page, this is not a good thing because it suggests they didn't find what they were looking for on that page.

   For more on this, see our article What are bounce rates and how do I reduce them?

6. More important Bonus question: What am I going to do about it?