Four FREE tools that every business should use on their web site
Here in Opportunity Wales we firmly believe in practicising what we preach. To that end I manage around 20 different Web sites from online communities to affiliate marketing sites, from Web directories to online shops. All of these Web sites have two things in common: firstly, they all make money and secondly they all use four completely free tools which allow me to improve them.
So what are these tools and could you use them on your Web site ?
Google Analytics
If you want to know how many visitors your Web site has had, where they’ve come from, how long they stay on your site and which pages they looked at then you need to use a Web analytics package of some sort. As part of your Web hosting you’ve probably got access to rudimentary statistics based on the log files generated by your Web server so why should you look at another solution ? Well most of the Web server based solutions need to update their lists of User Agents on a regular basis otherwise they will incorrectly count spiders as human visitors.
Solutions using ‘page tagging’ (so-called because it involves inserting a small pierce of JavaScript code into each page which logs each visitor to a central database) automatically discriminate between human visitors and spiders because no spider can run the JavaScript. The most widely used page tagging solution is the free Google Analytics package.
One advantage of Google Analytics is that, should you run more than one Web site, you can monitor all of your sites from within one control panel. It also integrates nicely with any Pay Per Click marketing that you are doing and will report on which adverts and keywords bring you the most traffic.
Digging a little deeper into it’s features, it also allow you to set up conversion funnels which allow you to see exactly where your customers are bailing out from your checkout process. Is it finding the ‘Check Out’ button ? Or registering for an account ? Perhaps it’s choosing a payment method ? Once you know, you’ll be able to address the issue because it’s easier to double your conversion ratio than it is to double the number of visitors to your Web site.
103Bees.com
At first glance, 103bees.com looks like another Web analytics package but it’s not. It’s primary goal is to quickly and easily show you the origin of traffic to your Web site (natural search listings, paid search or bookmarks) in realtime. One of the downsides to Google Analytics is that the data is 24 hours old when you get to see it. However, the real strength of 103bees.com is that allows you to very easily determine the search phrases that people use to find your site.
So what ? After all, Google Analytics can do that but the real strength of 103bees.com is that it helps you to identify the long tail of search queries for your Web site. Now ifyou’re thining ‘the long tail ?’ then don’t worry, you’re almost certainly not alone as it’s a concept that very few Web site owners have grappled.
The term was originally coined by Chris Anderson to describe the demand curve where relatively few products make up the bulk of a companies sales. However, if their overall sales catalogue is big enough then the sum total of all other products that they sell may actually be more than the total of their big sellers. Clearly, if the company can increase the sales of the ‘poorly’ performing products across the board then this will have the effect of boosting the companies overall income.
So how can this be applied to YOUR Web site ?
103bees.com will allow you to identify the search phrases that users to find your Web site in the search engines but will also allow you to quickly and easily visualise the long tail (the other queries that users use to find your site). These are most likely phrases contained on your exisiting pages. Once you can see these you can start to develop standalone content focusing on these phrases. Over time these new pages will start to rank for those phrases and will pull visitors in to your Web site.
So if you’re interested in attracting more visitors to your Web site 103bees.com makes the process of finding and tracking your long tail search keywords easier and makes prioritising the development of the content easier today.
CrazyEgg.com
CrazyEgg.com is another of those Web sites that, once I dicovered it, I couldn’t do without. Hopefully by now you’re using a decent Web analytics package to find out how many visitors you’ve had to your Web site but the level of detail is fairly coarse. You may not how many visitors a particularly page has had but do you know exactly where on the page the visitor clicked ?
Nope, not unless you’re using something like CrazyEgg.com. Working in a very similar way to both Google Analytics and 103bees.com, all it requires is the inclusion of a small piece of JavaScript code at the foot of the page that you’re interested in. It then logs every user to the page in question and monitors exactly where they click as well as their origin.
This allows you test the layout of your pages to see if the items that you want people to click on are actually getting the clicks that you want. It does this by producing ‘heat maps’ which are overlayed onto your Web page to show you the areas where the clicks are concentrated. If you’re revising the design of your Web site this is an amazingly useful tool.
Google Webmaster Console
Our fourth really useful tool is the Google Webmaster console. It’s extremely handy because it allows you to see your site from Google’s perspective and shows you ALL of the sites that link to yours (typing link:yourdomainname.co.uk into the Google search box will only show a random subset of links that Google knows about), as well as reporting on any errors that are preventing your site from being crawled. You can also see the phrases that people use to link to your site. It is these that play an important part in determining which phrases your Web pages rank for within the search engines.
To gain access to this information you’ll need to create a free Google Account and then need to prove that you own the site that you want to get details for by either uploading a small file that Google will then read or by adding a META tag to your front page. As long as you have access to your server either of these can be carried out in minutes.
So there you are. Those the four Web site tools that I can’t live without. Do you use them ? Or is there one that I’ve missed out. Please let me know by leaving a comment.