Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

If I was asked to give you just one piece of advice to improve the way you market your business online, it would be this:

Install Google Analytics for your website, and learn how to use it.

I know it doesn’t sound like an earth-shattering revelation, but making this one small change to your site is going to provide you with more insight into the way people interact with you online than anything else you’ve tried in the past.

Get Google Analytics

Since it was released as a public service, I’ve been recommending Google Analytics as my website monitoring package of choice for a small business. Why? Well, for starters it’s free. And the amount of information you can get from just one report is simply mind-boggling.

Without even scratching the surface of what Google Analytics is capable of, you can use a typical report to determine:

• How many people visited your website last month.
• How many of them have been there before.
• What pages were the most popular, and how long people spent on each page.
• Where visitors came from.
• What terms people searched for on their favourite search engine to get to your site.

What could Google Analytics do for your business?

Armed with a fresh Analytics report, you can use the above information to make some startling revelations. For example:

1. Finding out that you are getting 1000 visitors a month to your site, but only generating one sales enquiry means that you aren’t converting prospects as well as you could be.
2. Finding out that 80% of your audience has been to your site before indicates that people are hungry for more information from you. Give it to them.
3. Discovering what people search for to find your website will give you an insight into what people actually want from a company like yours. Perhaps you can change your product offering to suit people’s requirements, or simply make some modifications to the way you present your products online.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you can find the discipline to spend an hour every month figuring out what people want from your company, it shouldn’t be too difficult to decide which changes need to be made to your website to improve the results you get.

Within a fairly short time, you’ll start noticing an increase in visitors and qualified sales leads. That’s not half bad for a piece of free software, is it?