How effective is your web site? What, you don't know?
This has suddenly become so much more important to understand. Many of the portal sites want you to believe that they send your website a lot of traffic. Unless you measure this properly, how do you know that they are delivering what they claim.
It is also important to assess the traffic your website receives relative to your nearest competitors' sites.
If you are really serious, you need to subscribe to Hitwise or Comscore but each has a fairly hefty monthly subscription. Try Alexa.com and Statsaholic. The professionals sometimes condemn these two as inaccurate because they don't show all web traffic. However, they show patterns and even if a small sample of web users visit Rightmove more often than they visit Prime Location, you can still conclude that Rightmove is the busier site. So as an easy and free way of assessing your site versus your competitors' sites, they do a good job. If your traffic levels are higher than your competitors, sing that message loud and clear in your marketing. If not, chat to us about doing some Search Engine Optimisation for you.
Next, you need to find out where the enquiries are coming from. Sign up for a Google account at the Google home page then use it to add two excellent and free tools - Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Analytics needs you to drop a snippet of java code into your web sites pages but then reports where each enquiry comes from. This is particularly important for sites like Globrix which allow click-throughs to your properties on your site. The snag is that often the properties are not on your site! Lots of the VEBRA powered sites I've looked at, for example, display property details direct from the VEBRA server so their agent clients don't see or get credited with the resultant traffic. We've got a clever way round this so that a Globrix type click-through is recorded as a hit (from Globrix) on your site and therefore shows in your analytics.
Google Webmaster Tools shows you the queries that visitors have used to find your site with. You might, for example, think that "Houses to Sell in Bath" is the most popular way people get to your site. Webmaster Tools might prove otherwise.
Finally, you need to use another free Google tool called Google Rankings
This shows you how well you come up in searches when visitors use the popular queries identified by Webmaster Tools. If your site shows in the top 3 for "Houses to Sell in" your town you've probably done all you can!
If you follow these steps, you should be in a fine position to understand how and why your website gives you the traffic that it does. Don't spend a fortune on Search Engine Optmisation till you've done all this!
Next month I'll share some tips on SEO.
