8 tips for online success

As an online entrepreneur you know the feeling: You have had a website or webshop created. You have made a significant investment. Yet the number of visitors remains low. More importantly: The investment in the website or webshop is not recouped!

Do you want an online business with real online success? Then approach it as follows: your website or webshop is the foundation on which the house can be built. Only when the foundation is in place can the walls, windows and other components be placed.

The same applies to online marketing. Online marketing is a total package with different components. It is important that you start building in the right way to get the most return from your budget.

In this blog post we give 8 tips that you should pay attention to to achieve online success with your website or webshop. So that your company is rock solid online!

1. Follow your visitors closely

From the moment your website goes live, you can ‘follow’ your website visitors. To stick with the metaphor: You want to know who comes into your house and what exactly they are doing there. The same goes for your website.

Which pages do visitors arrive on? How long do your visitors stay on the website? From which page do visitors leave your website? These are all relevant questions to include in your online marketing strategy. These questions and more can be answered by linking your website to Google Analytics. This program is now known to many entrepreneurs and most websites are linked to Google Analytics or other web analytics programs.

Is your website not yet linked to Google Analytics?Click here for an easy step-by-step plan.

2. Performance of pages and texts

What many entrepreneurs do not know: Google Analytics offers many more options. With Google Analytics, specific goals and funnels can be set. For example, it is recorded when a certain button is clicked, when visitors spend a certain time on the page or when a certain page is visited.

Achieving such a specific goal is what we call a conversion. Once the possible conversion points per page are clear, the pages can be analyzed. Will the button be clicked more often if I use this text? Will I achieve more sales if I write in the ‘active voice’?

We call this way of optimizing web pages conversion optimization.

3. Don’t underestimate the effect of design

I hear you thinking: ‘What does online success have to do with beautiful colors and pictures on my website?’. Well, a lot!

It cannot be emphasized enough: Visitors determine in the first few seconds whether your website is what they are looking for or not.

Using the right web design (including colors and images!) makes a major contribution to this. Posts regularly appear that talk about the latest web design trends. Good web design can have very positive results for the conversion of your website.

My advice: Think carefully about the design of your website and use wireframing in large projects. What do you want to convey to your visitors? What is the purpose of your website? Do you want to inform or activate people?

4. Specially for B2B: Collect concrete leads

In the first point of this list I told you about tracking visitors to your website. In addition to passively following these visitors, you can identify and approach the visitors. It is very interesting, especially for business-to-business organizations, to know which companies are on your website. How this is possible?

Many companies have linked their company name to their ‘service provider’. This service provider is registered in Google Analytics. All you have to do is request this data, analyze it and estimate whether this is an interesting lead!

Prefer to outsource this reporting? Which can! Ask via our contact form!

Another common method of lead collection is through forms. The data submitted in forms is stored automatically. With these forms you can build an extensive file over time, increasing your online success.

5. What do you have to offer your visitors?

In a good relationship there is give and take. A relationship between websites and visitors works exactly the same. Visitors are quite willing to give you something, as long as they feel like they are getting something in return.

But what do you give to your visitors?

The right answer to this question often starts with yourself. Ask yourself, what makes you visit a website more often? By asking our customers this question over and over again, we’ve found a common answer.

Visitors come to your website more often if it radiates clarity and professionalism.

It is nice for visitors to know what the website stands for and what information they can find there. In addition, this information must be sufficiently extensive and professional, so that they do not continue searching on another website. Finally, extras such as a white paper, a tool, a download or an infographic that give your website the look it needs.

6. Do you have online success in Google?

For many entrepreneurs, the most important measure of online success: the infamous Google ranking. How high are you in Google now? How do you get higher in Google? What search terms do my visitors use?

Hundreds of articles have been written about achieving online success in Google. I will therefore not go into that in this article. I prefer to focus on the way of checking. How do you know if you are successful in Google?

Many entrepreneurs check the status by entering their company name into Google. Unfortunately, this is not the way to check whether your e-business is successful. Google adjusts the search results based on location, IP address, previous searches, etc. That is why you see a completely different screen than your neighbor or the woman from three streets away. How do you check your status?

A first, global test is to open an ‘incognito screen’ on your browser. This partially blocks the information you give to Google, making search results more general. In addition, it is important not to search directly for your company name. Also search for your products, services or with a specific question.

7. Automate online success

Do tips 1 to 6 sound familiar to you? Is your website in an advanced stage of online success? Then it becomes interesting to automate your success!

You may have heard of it: Marketing automation.

Marketing automation uses complicated software that allows your website to automatically attract customers. How? By registering data and anticipating this with so-called ‘push messages’. These are messages (often emails) that are sent to direct visitors back to your website or webshop, for example to make a purchase.

Different starting points, or ‘triggers’, can be set for this form of automation. Examples of these triggers are completing a purchase, leaving data, visiting a certain page, etc. The condition is, of course, that the contact details are known.

Marketing automation was previously mainly used by the largest web shops such as Wehkamp and Coolblue, with which they achieved great online success. Nowadays the software is so accessible that smaller companies can also use it, albeit on a smaller scale.

8. CTR from Google

A successful website radiates professionalism. The first moment of contact with the website is crucial. But what is the first moment of contact? The moment when visitors click on your website? The moment when visitors view your website?

No. The first possible point of contact with your website is when visitors encounter your website in the Google search results. The way your website appears here can make a world of difference.

Google search results are displayed according to a fixed pattern displayed:

• Title
• URL
• Meta description

These components can be manually adjusted per page. By making smart use of this and typing an attractive description, users are more likely to click on your website.

How often users click on your website via Google is called CTR (Click Through Rate). Hundreds of articles have been written about increasing the CTR of a website. The bottom line is that you have to think carefully about what exactly the user is looking for and what makes your website distinctive.

The best way to measure CTR is via Google Search Console. The best way to test the CTR is through trial-and-error: just try it!

Conclusion

There are many different ways to achieve online success with your website. The best way differs per company.

One thing is certain: it is important to keep statistics of your visitors.

These statistics form the basis of your website. In theory these metrics should improve after each change, if not you’re left to wonder if it was a successful change. In the worst case, you can always choose to reverse this, but you will not get the lost customers back.

Not sure what the ‘best way forward’ is for you? Contact us! Together we determine what the best step is for your online business.