Website Health: Only the Crazy Ones Fly Blind
You have a website and your friends say its one of the best they’ve seen. That’s good.
Your webmaster installed Google Analytics on it and every now and then you give it a look.
Traffic is slowly increasing. You pat yourself on the back and get back to work.
Does this sound familiar?
Test Your Website Health
If your personal health was at risk you would likely consult with a physician who would start testing a number of metrics. If he or she could not identify the problem, more testing would be ordered.
Once identified and treated, your doctor would order you back for repeat testing to be certain the problem is resolved. After experiences like this, you are smarter too because you are more aware.
What’s your awareness of your website health? Like any other business investment, it should be doing what it promised.
The only way to know for sure is testing and analysis. And the universally accepted method for accomplishing this is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is an amazing website tool that happens to be free. But for it to provide data that leads to insights for making better business decisions, it has to be set up properly and used consistently.
Last year I was visiting my friend Andy who owns a website development company. He is an SEO expert who is obsessed with the analytics of his company’s site. Surprisingly, with all of the fancy tools out there, he relies mostly on the Google Analytics.
Andy doesn’t just check his web analytics daily, but throughout the day, keeping a window open on his computer monitor. This may be extreme behavior but it’s better than flying blind.
And that’s what you are doing if you are not checking at all, or if you don’t understand how to properly collect and interpret the data. I know, because the more I learn about this the more I understand the power of analytics for getting my website to do its job.
Discover Google Analytics
There are no excuses for not understanding your website health because Google offers free Google Analytics Academy training. The 5 modules are broken into about fifteen 5-10 minute video lessons. If you complete just the first module you’ll know enough to do this reasonably well yourself, or to intelligently delegate or hire it out.
Try this.
Watch one video every day and test your knowledge with the short quiz that follows it. The total time commitment is about ten minutes.
You may discover, as I did, that your Google Analytics were not properly set-up. Surprise! With that fixed I’m now learning how to configure my analytics for collecting and reporting more meaningful data.
Your business website is an asset that owes you a return on your investment. Don’t wait until you’re not so busy to get to it because it takes time to develop and sustain your website health.
My guess is your landscape or lawn care business depends on local search results. Therefore, while you are learning about website performance, you should also discover how your website is specifically doing in local search results.
Nearly every small business has inaccurate local listings that compromise SEO and search results with the local directories.
The steps to fix this and keep it working for you are revealed in episode 11 of Landscape Digital Show: Local Search: Why Accurate Listings are Important.
Now go out there and do something about your website health.
But before you do, please help your landscape and lawn care friends discover how to join the community here at Landscape Digital Institute
I know they will appreciate you for it.
