By: Scott Offord

In a previous article, “Four Keys to Making Your Website Work for You,” I outlined four crucial considerations for creating a website that works hard for you night and day: (1) clarify your goals, (2) employ a competent web developer to help you fulfill those goals, (3) make sure your visitors can navigate the website easily to find what they are looking for, and (4) fill your pages with content that is easy on the eyes and clearly understandable. Now, let’s assume you’ve done all that and your website is in place. Is your job over? Not by a long shot. Don’t think of your website as something set in stone just because it’s up and people are finding you on the Web. To help make your site work its hardest, treat it as a developing entity that evolves over time. How can you determine the ways your website should develop? Some of the most relevant information will come from the feedback you get from your visitors, existing customers, and potential customers. In this article, I want to identify two major ways feedback can help you hone your website into a razor-edged marketing tool.

Use Customer and Visitor Feedback to Determine Content

No doubt, you have already used the Customer and Visitor Feedback principle to some extent in designing your website. For one thing, you probably used what you already knew about your customers’ typical interests. You may have also employed sound information about how website visitors tend to read a page. But now that your site is up, it’s time to consider, in greater depth, how analyzing customer and visitor feedback could continue shaping the development of your site. Such feedback typically stems from two main sources: comments and questions that arise from the site itself, and calls and emails directed toward other aspects of your business.

Let’s take these in reverse order. Phone calls and emails you receive from actual or potential customers and clients are liable to ask for information about any of a wide range of matters. These might include, for instance, the prices of your services, your guarantees, or your policies; or, if you sell products, their available styles, colors, sizes, or uses. Keeping a record of these inquiries would enable you to discover what kinds of questions keep cropping up. If questions about some aspect of your business arise again and again, that aspect may be ripe for addressing on your website. By doing so, you not only provide a new source of information to your customers, you may also reduce the number of time-consuming phone calls and correspondence you must address on a daily basis. Online text that speaks to your customers’ concerns could substantially enhance your customer support process, saving you many hours of having to repeatedly answer the same simple phone and email questions. How you arrange website text that speaks to frequent inquiries will depend on the types of questions you are answering. In some cases, it may be necessary to address various issues on separate pages. In others, a Frequently Asked Questions page may do the trick. In either case, make sure to let the principles of clear navigation and clearly written content guide your approach.

In determining how to develop your site, it’s also very important to pay close attention to comments and questions that come from your website visitors. This feedback may uncover problems with the website you have overlooked. For instance, if visitors are emailing you to ask for information that is already on the site, this indicates that they are not locating the information. Examine the site through the visitors’ eyes and try to determine why they are not finding what they are seeking. Is there a missing, malfunctioning, or difficult-to-find link? Is the information somehow obscured, perhaps buried on some page where your visitor would not expect to find it? Other comments from visitors may tell you something about difficulties in navigating the website or about the clarity of your site information. Any feedback that points you toward problems so far unnoticed is online gold. To mine that gold, be sure to make it easy for visitors to send you their comments and questions through prominent email links on the site.

One other major benefit of online and offline feedback is that it’s free! But don’t for one moment let that lead you to suppose that the feedback isn’t very valuable. Visitor and customer feedback is one of your most important tools for developing and sharpening your website, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing efficiency.

Analyze Traffic to Determine Your Visitors’ Website Behavior

Another very useful kind of feedback consists of web traffic analysis reports, which provide important information about your website visitors’ behavior. Traffic analysis begins by telling you how many visitors you are receiving each month, along with the total and average number of page views. This is important information, but it’s only the beginning of the useful statistics you can find when analyzing website traffic.

For example, it can also be illuminating to know where your visitors are coming from. Did they find your website by doing a Google search? Yahoo? MSN? What search engine links are working best for you? Are any visitors arriving after clicking on banners you are paying for on various sites, or via pay-per-click links you are purchasing? If not, it might be useful to rethink your site marketing strategies in these areas.

Website statistics can also tell you how long your visitors are remaining on your site, what pages they are visiting, and how long they are staying on each page. What pages do they stay on the longest? Which the shortest? Do these numbers correspond with what you would expect? Or do they indicate that visitors are spending relatively little time on pages that are important for your message to get through. If so, these pages may need to be redesigned—perhaps the content that you thought was so well written is not capturing your visitors’ attention the way you planned.

Traffic analysis begins with raw information, but that’s only the start. Gleaning insights from that information is where the real value begins. Interpreting the information and comparing it to what you received in previous months can tell you whether your website marketing strategies are working and whether the website itself is doing its job. Traffic analysis is another area in which a competent and experienced web development company can be of great service. The company should have the ability to provide you with comprehensive reports that help you determine not only the usefulness of your website, but also the effectiveness of your offline and online marketing efforts.

If your website is up, it is already collecting potentially vital information at this very moment—information that can help guide the evolution of your site. As I’ve written before, a well-developed website will be flexible and able to expand as your company grows and as feedback suggests it should. Your new website should already have been built so that when you start to see areas needing improvement, existing content can be easily edited and new pages can be added quickly.

Bringing it All Together

Understanding what your customers and visitors are looking for, and presenting them with the information they are wanting is the key to a successful web presence. The crucial role for both kinds of feedback outlined above is to tell you what you can be doing more effectively on your website. Feedback in the form of comments and questions can help tell you whether your website is providing clear and pertinent content to your existing and potential customers, and what content to add. Feedback in the form of intelligently interpreted website statistics can help you understand whether your pages are engaging visitors and how well your site marketing strategies are working. Your responses to both kinds of feedback can help hone your site to razor sharpness. The likely results are increased sales, happier customers, and a more streamlined customer service process.