Blog post -
The Proof Is In Your Numbers
Article by David Johnstone
Quite often, people ask me how they can get more phone calls or booked appointments. The answer is simple. Get more visitors to your website. Ideally, the RIGHT visitors: People who really want or need what you offer.
More website visitors = more calls and booked appointments.
But not all visitors are ready call or book an appointment with you today, so you need to be bringing more and more visitors back to your website every day.
This brings me to why “the proof is in your numbers.” From your historical numbers you should know how many people visit your website and how many of those resulted in phone calls or appointments. Google analytics gives you your visitor counts. You just need to track and count the calls and the bookings.
If you have an online calendar, visitors can book an appointment with you. People really do love handling their scheduling themselves. Then it's easy to count your bookings.
For the phone calls, if you have a different number on your website (different from your normal office number) then you can count those, too. Now you are set. You can see how many visitors it takes to get a certain number of calls and booked appointments.
The numbers don't stop there. You always need to be increasing your visits. Where are you telling people about your services or your offer online? Where are people coming from to visit your website?
Google Analytics can help. You can see how many people are coming from the popular sites to learn more about you, your offer or your services. Look at your data. How many visitors did you have during the past 30 days from:
•YouTube
•Google Search (organic searches)
•Google Maps
•Bing Search
•Yahoo Search
•Emails you sent
•Yelp
•Google ADs
•Bing ADs
I like to see where the most visitors are coming from. Then I do more on that platform, since there is already lots of interest there.
Did you know Google Analytics can email your numbers to you? Would you like them weekly or monthly? You get to choose when it’s set up.
Often, people are only thinking about Google. How can I get more people finding me on Google? Yes, it’s great to get clicks from Google. Here are some more numbers to watch to help improve your Google results.
How many words are on your website? It takes strong, well-researched, helpful, and better content on your website to squeeze out competitors and to make room for you in one of the exclusive spots on the first page of Google results. It’s unlikely that you can provide a better answer or solution with less words than what is already there. In most cases, your page will need 1,000 or more words. Simply check the word count of the website in position 10 of your search. Then create better content with more words. This tool will count the words on a webpage https://wordcount.weglot.com Google see that your page is mobile friendly? The scoring here is either yes or no. If it's no, then you’ll want to fix it. Check your page with this tool => https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
Is your page fast? Does it display within three seconds? Find out here => https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
If your score is colored red or orange, it needs to be faster. You want to see a green score. Is it even possible to get a green score?
Yes, it is! Put this site into page speed to see it => https://YourWebGeeks. There is one additional “speed” site I like, and it’s to see how a website is performing at 12 locations around the world. This is great if your clients or buyers are international. If you are only interested in U.S. visitors, five of the 12 locations are in the U.S.
This gives lots of numbers, but “First Meaningful Paint” (FMP) is the best number to look at. FMP is the time it takes for a page’s primary content to appear on the screen. Coined by Google, FMP is often used as a primary measurement for user-perceived loading experience. Paint refers to the time at which the browser displays web page content onto a user’s screen. A ‘first meaningful paint’ suggests that the content of the page, versus a header or navigation, is shown to the user. This is the site where you can see your speed for all 12 locations => https://www.fastorslow.com
Can you see the proof in your numbers? Are your numbers showing where to fix things and where to focus more effort to improve your results?
If you want help improving your numbers or want help getting your numbers from Google Analytics, contact David Johnstone David@FlashForwardSites.com FlashForwardSites.com
