Many companies we speak to complain that their website does not really add value to the business, or that its not meeting the objectives they had originally envisaged.  They get persuaded that its now out of date, and needs a revamp. In fact if you analyse the most successful websites they hardly ever get revamped (google, twitter, facebook, ebay), sure they add functionality, but the fundmental look and feel is straight forward, uncomplicated, and constant.

Web designers are typically interested in delivering a site which the client likes (i.e. looks great), but theres a whole lot more that they could be doing in the field of educating clients about maximising the return from the website, which would benefit the web designer and the client.

The argument against doing a business plan is:  its a brochure website we don't need to go to all that effort, or we are not an e-commerce site, or how can we predict the numbers of visitors to plug into the plan. Well the answer is that you can and should develop a plan, it need not be complicated or long winded but it should set out the potential marketsize, forecast and initial market share and have targets for turning visitors into clients, you can then develop targets for returning customers, financial performance etc. Cube have developed a methodology to maximise the return from websites -  Traffic, Trust and Transactions ™

So how do we go about it ?

Step 1 Research,  set goals and objectives

The first step is to do research,  to answer the following questions

1. What are people looking for on the web in relation to my product or services ?
2. How many of them are there ?
3. Where are they located ?
4. Who is our competition ?

There are tools on the web, many of them free which provide accurate information on the exact keywords/phrases people are searching for, the number of searches for those phrases on a month by month basis, and where those people are located even down to the district in the town.

So now we now the web based marketsize on a month by month basis for our products. How do we determine the people who are browsing from those people who are ready to buy? Typically the person who is ready to buy uses a 4+ word phrase (so browsers use a single word, comparers use a two-three word search).

We use those phrases to analyse who the competition is, their strengths and weaknesses,

Step 2 Develop Evidence based content

We can now write our content to target those  phrases which are searched for in our target geographies (keywords in the meta data are largely ignored by search engines these days, other than to  drop the rank of people who populate them with words which are not congruent with the content of the article)

Step 3 Analyse our performance

Using tools such as statcounter, and google analytics, we can see the number of people who visit the site, how they got there (what keywords were searched on what search engine, twitter, facebook ),  their geographic  location and if its a corporate user the company they work for. The pages they viewed on our website, how long they stayed on the site, the jump off point, and the number of times they have returned to the site.

Step 4 Increase our market share

We now know the market size, our share, the number of conversions from visitors to clients. We can now set targets and implement strategies both to increase our share of the search and conversions, develop new products that people are actively looking for, or move into new geographies because we know there is a need.

The information contained in this article is only really a introduction to what should be done and what is possible, if you'd like to know more contact us