Having a website for your business is critical in today’s world. But, how do you know if your website is doing what it should? The key is to measure your success. Doing so will allow you to tangibly see the results and adjust your strategy along the way.

Install analytics

If you aren’t getting visitor data via analytics go and get some set up on your site today. It’s cheap or free and will give you the data that you need. You can see how many visitors you get each day, where they are coming from and what keywords they used to get to your site. This is all valuable information that will help you determine what is working with your site and what is not.

You can get really technical with analytics and set up all kinds of custom reporting, but at the beginning, stick to the basics and get your head around what’s going on with your site.

Set Goals

If you don’t have any goals for the website, it’s hard to measure anything. So, get some concrete goals down on paper and see how your site is performing.

For example, if you are a financial advisor your goal could be to get 2 leads from your website via an email newsletter sign up per month. This would be your initial goal. Then you would track your progress via your newsletter software and analytics. You would see whether people are hitting your landing page with your form enough or if you need to adjust the design to get more conversions.

Re-align constantly

In the past companies would redesign their website every 3-5 years. This can be costly and many people are not sure why they are doing it other than to “stay current”. That’s all well and good, and sometimes you really need to engage in a top to bottom redesign. However, a good practice for most businesses is to measure and adjust or re-align the website’s design on a continual basis. Doing so will give you better results, simply because you are basing your decisions on data and not just personal preference.

Get your analytics installed and start measuring your success. Evolve your website over time to help you achieve your goals faster. This way you can know that you are getting a solid return on investment.