Get a Return on Your Website Investment

One of the recurring questions that any client who is interested in seeing their website succeed, is “what will my return of investment be?” This question is very important to ensuring that you are spending your money well, and more than anything else knowing the answer will demonstrate that you have a key understanding of the services that you’re paying for. Some companies can make grand claims when offering web design, development and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services, promising an exceptionally high return on very little investment, but at MB Web we like to ensure that we provide you with realistic expectations of how our web marketing services will perform. Part of understanding what makes a website great will give you insight as to how you will receive a great return on your investment, and give you a better understanding of what metrics you can use to measure its success. In this article we’ll look at what we do at MB Web to ensure that you get a great return on your investment (ROI), and give you an idea of what some metrics for success are.

Know Your ROI Metrics

There are a number of metrics that can be used to indicate the success of your website, and depending on the purpose of your site and whether you want to sell directly through your website or not, will affect which metrics are relevant to you. Before we get into some metrics that can be used to measure your ROI you need to know that as with most things sales related, this is a numbers game, and in almost all cases (excusing your bounce rate from this particular equation) more is better.

Sales Conversion Metrics

Conversion Metrics
One of the obvious indicators of success is how many sales have been made as a direct result of your website. This can be simple to track, or potentially vague depending on how you approach sales on your website. For instance, if you sell directly from your website utilising an eCommerce system you can clearly record the number of sales that you have made, and most eCommerce platforms that we use at MB Web are able to clearly track sale metrics. There are also systems that can make use of cookies to track whether a visitor to a website is a new customer or returning, and through them making a purchase you can gain insight into how effective your marketing is. Increased sales through your eCommerce solution are easy to track, but sales made as a result of someone finding you online can be more difficult to track, yet should not be excluded from the equation when considering how successful your website is. For instance you could opt to have a call to action that requires a potential client to enquire through email or a phone call before they can make a purchase, and there are systems that the team at MB Web can put in place to track the majority of these to give you a clearer understanding of how much benefit you are receiving from your website.

Sign Up Rates & Calls to Action

Sign Up Metrics
As we’ve already said, we can provide tracking of numerous actions on your website, and one of these can be to track how, when and why someone completes a call to action such as signing up for a recurring newsletter, an email marketing list or just to be notified of the latest and greatest product services that you are soon to offer. Sign up rates are a great metric of tracking how successful your website is, and for some businesses high email sign up rates are invaluable and provide a more direct method of communicating with your customer, negating the need to hope that they’ll find all of your products and services on your site. For some an eCommerce platform that provides customers with an option to buy directly from a site such as the Match Bags website, which whilst sophisticated aren’t necessarily appropriate. In these cases ones such as those available at Clarkes, who offer a selection of high quality furniture are more appropriate, as certain products require a user to enquire about a product to purchase it.

Understanding the Importance of SEO Metrics

SEO Machine
For some companies their website is purely used for marketing purposes and whilst this degree of marketing shouldn’t be confused for advertising just for advertisings sake; after all you still want to see a return on your investment, a high performing website can be important to raising awareness of your brand and informing potential clients of your products and services. A well designed website should give a clear message about who you are and what you do, and this can be achieved through a number of methods, from making materials about your services and products clearly available, to writing blog articles that go into detail about individual or groups of products and services. Your SEO campaign with MB Web will track a number of metrics that will indicate how your website is performing, some of which we will detail below.

Gain an Understanding of Your Online Traffic

Traffic
One of the most obvious metrics of how well your website is performing that anyone who has held a passing interest in their website over the years will be aware of is how many people have visited their website. Whilst this is a great indication of how successful your site is there are a number of factors that are important to consider. Bounce rates are one of the metrics that we pay close attention to at MB Web as part of our SEO service; these effectively indicate how long someone has spent on your site after having clicked on a link from a search engine such as Google. A high bounce rate is bad as it indicates that someone has clicked on your site, had a quick look at the page they have landed on and promptly left. Conversely a low bounce rate indicates that on average most visitors are spending time on your website, which Google interprets as meaning that that individual has found what they were looking for on your site, rather than the less desirable opposite reaction. This is also reflected in average session duration metrics, amongst a whole host of other tracking tools that can indicate several different metrics of your website.
How you target your business geographically can also be a factor to consider when figuring out if the traffic to your website is giving you a good return on your investment. For instance if your business provides a service to specific area, for instance at MB Web we are based in Lewes and predominantly provide our web marketing services to businesses based in East Sussex, Kent, Surrey and the surrounding counties, so receiving a lot of web traffic from Russia won’t be beneficial. To see a good return on your investment you want to see traffic predominantly coming through from areas where your product or service is relevant, so at MB Web we prefer for our web traffic to come from the UK as that is where our clients are predominantly based.

What You Can Do to See a Great ROI

There are several things that can be done to ensure that your website excels and provides you with a great return on your investment, at MB Web we work to ensure that our web marketing teams meet these requirements.

Great Design is Essential

Design
One of the most important things you can do as part of your marketing efforts is to ensure that your website which has a clear sense of design direction that exemplifies what your brand is about and what your company does. For instance one of our clients at MB Web is Las Bodegas, and on their website you can see a clear indication of the style and theme that they want to exude, as well as a clear indication of what products they offer (in this case some of the best import wines available). In addition to a clear visual styling, navigation of the Las Bodegas site is clear and stylised in a way that echoes their branding. Essentially the Las Bodegas website is a great advert for who they are and what they do. The website has also been designed with a clear call to action on every page. For this site the ‘call to action’ is to get in contact with the fine people at Las Bodegas, whether to enquire about a specific wine, or get in touch about something more general. Providing a clear call to action is a must for every website; it allows for an effective natural method of establishing contact with your potential clients. This metric is a simple yet effective way of measuring how much return you are receiving from your investment.

Development That Supports the Design

Web Coding
Having a great design for a website is a fantastic start to ensuring that you get a great ROI, but without a great developer putting everything together it can be difficult to realistically achieve your vision. Part of what makes a website great is how unique it is, and in conjunction with a great design team, a website developer should be able to ensure that your website utilises a bespoke development that incorporates your design from the front end through to a customised Content Management System (CMS) that makes implementing everything from fresh content through to SEO elements a breeze. We also encourage many of our clients to consider a responsive design for their website as this enables their website to be clearly viewed on numerous screen sizes and devices including mobile and tablet devices. This allows for a better user experience on your website, and is also highly beneficial to your SEO campaign if you want to gain the benefit of mobile search rankings. At MB Web we’re proud to say that our development and design team work perfectly in sync and ensure that even the most demanding designs become a reality. One of the areas that our development team really shines is in how they code a website. As the standard for good coding moves forwards with the ethos that less is more, our development team have streamlined coding efforts ensure that the bespoke websites that we produce aren’t bloated from a development perspective and run as smoothly as possible.

SEO isn’t Just the Icing on the Cake

SEO Cake
Some people can view SEO as an afterthought, something to be considered at a later date, but at MB Web we know that SEO is an important part of the overall success on any website, and because of this we implement tools for SEO during the design and development of every new website that we commit to. We live in a digital age where the idea that something can be considered finished is far behind us, and you only have to look at the Zuckerberg‘s of the world to know that websites evolve and constantly change without an end in sight. Whilst not everyone can commit the necessary resources to have a continually changing website, having an ongoing SEO campaign will ensure that your website visibility is maintained and that content is kept fresh. Along with the metrics that we mentioned previously, our SEO team are committed to ensuring that a number of your keywords gain great positioning on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP), and along with providing fresh engaging content that stands out from the crowd your SEO campaign can provide you with a great ROI. Every SEO campaign stands a better chance at increasing your ROI through continued communication to ensure that the right goals are being sought after, and some of the most successful campaigns have been achieved through collaboration with clients who understand the process of the goals being sought after.

Find Out More

At MB Web we’re proud to say that our web design, development and SEO team are all highly experienced and skilled at producing exceptional websites which give our clients a great return on their investment through successfully projecting their brand beyond its previous confines; gaining new potential clients and converting visitors into actual clients. If you want to find out more about how we can provide you with a website that embodies exceptional design, bespoke development and great SEO potential don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can contact David Park or Jake Judd using our online contact form, by sending an email to hello@juddassoc.com or by calling our Lewes office on 01273 478822, and we’ll be more than happy to discuss how the team at MB Web can help you.