Website Terminology
An increase in web traffic is attracting traditional brick and mortar businesses to bring their business online.
Here are some basic terms to help new internet users understand some of the basic terms used to analyze the effectiveness of a website in terms of generating traffic and lead conversion.
1) Visitors
This is the number of people who have come to your website for the first time or who are coming back for a second time. This is important, because this is the size of the pool of people from which you are trying to get leads. The bigger the number of visitors, the more potential for you to get leads.
2) Leads
This is the number of people who self-select on your website and do something to give you their contact information. It could be signing up for a demonstration, requesting a whitepaper, or viewing a video, but there must be a form where they give you at least their email address and sometimes more information as well. This number is critical since your website leads are where your sales come from.
3) Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of your total website visitors who become a lead. So, if you had 200 visitors to your website today, and you generated 3 leads, that would be a 1.5% conversion rate. Most people will tell you that a 1-2% conversion rate is the average for a b2b website. The conversion rate is important because it is telling you how efficient your website is at turning visitors into leads. Remember, you can double your company’s number of leads by either doubling your website traffic or doubling your conversion rate.
4) Website Grade
Websites are graded on a scale from 1 to 100 - a score of 100 is excellent and a score of 1 means no one will find your site. This analysis gives you an excellent overview of the marketing effectiveness of your website, including things like your Google Page Rank, number of inbound links and other key statistics. What is nice about a website grade is that it summarizes this all into one number from 1 to 100. You should know what your website grade is and track it over time to make sure you improve (or if you already get a good score, to make sure you don’t slip.
5) Keyword Search Rank
For most business websites, the most efficient traffic and leads will come from organic search. This is the traffic that comes from people searching on Google, MSN and Yahoo and other engines and finding your website in the results. This traffic is not completely “free”, since you need to work on your website to really maximize it, but it is usually much more cost effective than other sources. You need to know how you rank in the search engines for at least a few key terms related to your business, and you also want to know how that rank is changing over time - are you moving up or down - since that will determine the future success of your website visitors and leads.