You’ve got a website, you’ve optimized your website for local search keywords and city names, you’ve updated your Google Local and Yahoo Local profiles, and you are finally getting some traffic.
Now what?
The traffic isn’t going to help your business unless you can get your visitors to take action. For a small business with a local storefront, this usually means getting a qualified website visitor to call you, or to visit your place of business.
Provide a Clear Call To Action
The first step is to provide a clear “call to action” for your site visitors.
A call to action is simply a button, or invitation prominently displayed on your site that asks your visitor for action. It should be immediately obvious to your visitors what you want them to do when they visit your site.
It seems simple but don’t take it for granted - many small business websites don’t do this. Don’t be afraid to ask for the phone call or visit, and provide your phone number and directions on the page.
This doesn’t mean you have to be obnoxious - if you take it too far you might drive potential customers away. But make it easy and obvious for them how to reach you and schedule an appointment or find out more about your products and services.
Measure Your Progress
Next, you’ll want to set up some easy ways to track your website visits and the phone calls it generates for you.
If you have someone doing your SEO/SEM, they are already doing this for you. But if not, you need a way to track your website visits and calls.
Here are a few easy and inexpensive things you can do to monitor the effectiveness of your website:
Check your Google Local profile. While logged into your Google account, go to http://www.google.com/local/add - and if you’ve claimed your Google Local profile you’ll see the number of “Impressions” and the number of “Views” of your profile in the past 30 days on this page.
Impressions tells you how many times you showed up in a local search result. Views means how many people actually viewed your profile. Note that these are separate from visits to your website.
Set up Google Analytics on your website. Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to track all kinds of information about your website. You’ll want to be measuring your website traffic so that you know how many visitors are coming, where they are coming from, and if visits are trending up or down.
This is a huge topic in its own right but the key is to start tracking right now so that you build a history of stats and can begin to measure some basic things about your website.
For example, you can set up a simple report to be emailed to you weekly that will tell you how many unique visitors you had, which keywords they are using in the Google or Yahoo search box to find your site, and which other sites are referring traffic to you.
Set up Call Tracking on your website. An easy way to measure how many phone calls your website generates is to sign up for a Virtual Phone Service provider like RingCentral. You can get an account for $9.95/month, which includes a local phone number.
You can put that number on your website in your call to action, or include a “click-to-call” button that visitors can press to call your phone and theirs simultaneously.
All of these calls are logged, and you can set it up to send a call log report to your email daily, weekly or monthly.
Keep Measuring and Improving
Now that you have a clear call to action on your website, and have set yourself up with some basic reports that measure your website visits and the phone calls they generate, you are on your way to turning your website into a powerful tool for promoting your business.
Establishing a baseline like this allows you to measure the effectiveness of new marketing campaigns or search optimization efforts, and helps you determine how much value you are getting from your marketing dollars.
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Don Campbell is the publisher of Expand2Web, a blog that helps small business owners like Chiropractors build Wordpress powered websites, and get a steady stream of new customers from Google and Yahoo. In his leisure time Don enjoys learning to play Jazz piano, skiing, and wakeboarding. He lives with his wife and two daughters in the San Jose, California.
