Does your website work for you?

I’ve worked on a number of projects in the past year where I had to clean up after someone else’s redesign. I had actually done the SEO on the sites but wasn’t involved in the redesign project. These were websites that had really good traffic prior to the redesign, but then took a major nosedive when the site relaunched. The business owners took a big hit in revenue due to a big loss of website traffic. But the owners didn't have to take this loss!

Imagine this… you’re away from your computer and pull out your smartphone to find some critical information (like what’s the address of that new restaurant?), but you end up on a website that definitely isn’t mobile-friendly. You are trying to view a website, but you can hardly read it. You are pinching and squeezing and zooming and scrolling just to read the page. Then you try to click a link, but hit the wrong one and have to wait forever for the new page to load so you can try again. Finally, you give up and go back to Google to find a different website.

I was recently engaged by a client to write a couple of payment plugins for the VirtueMart e-commerce system. VirtueMart is a Joomla-based shopping cart that is pretty popular. I love writing code, but to be honest, this was a really difficult experience for me. Not because the code itself was so hard, but because of what I found once I got started.

Do you want increased traffic to your site? No! All traffic with no conversion is just an expense with no benefit to you. What you want is traffic that converts. Google Analytics Goals is just the tool to help you achieve those greater conversions.

Last week, we discussed what Google Analytics Goals are, the 4 different goal types, and how they can benefit your online business strategy. This week we’ll cover the basics of how to actually set them up.

If you are not using Goals in Google Analytics, you are really missing the power of your analytics and knowing how well your website is working. While it is important to increase your site traffic, that is only part of the picture. High traffic is great, but all traffic and no action is not exactly what you had in mind and it isn’t going to help your business. There is a solution.

Today, we’re going to give a basic introduction to Google Analytics Goals to help you learn what they are and how they can help you in growing your business through your website.

The entire reason that you are backing up (and storing your backup offline, of course) is in case your website gets hacked, or the server crashes, or one of the million reasons you might need that backup. But your backup is only valuable if it works. There’s nothing worse than needing the backup, thinking you’ve got one, and then seeing it fail when you need to restore it. Been there, done that, no fun!