Stop Good Websites from Going Bad
Filed under: Analytics, SEO on Monday, September 24th, 2007 by Simon HeseltineTime for another edition of ‘Analogy Corner’.
If you’re driving your car back and forth from work, to the shops, etc, every day, you’ll probably believe that everything is going great. Your car gets you from point A to point B, it serves it’s purpose, and you’re happy that it does. Until that day that it just stops. It breaks down. Why did it happen? Why weren’t there warning signs? Well, it happened because you weren’t paying attention to the smaller details, the big picture looked rosy, but underneath small problems were popping up that you didn’t notice. Those problems then either increased in magnitude, or combined with other issues to cause the break down. As for warning signs? They were most likely there, maybe it was a noise coming from the engine that you didn’t notice because you have the radio up loud? Maybe even a warning light on your dashboard that you’ve ignored? It’s at the point when you’re standing by the road, watching cars whiz by, while you wait for assistance that you start to think that you should have been more diligent in getting your car serviced and checked out. Then you wouldn’t be in this mess.
Now, and here comes the analogy, imagine that the car was your website, it’s running along great, you’re getting plenty of orders / donations / sign ups. Then suddenly, it all breaks down. Traffic drops. Sales / donations / sign ups fall off. How could this happen? Why were there no warnings? Just like the car, if you haven’t been paying attention to the squealing brakes, or that strange knocking noise every time you make a left turn, the warnings have been there, you’ve just ignored them.
So what can you do? Well, primarily you need to ensure that you have a diagnostic system in place, and the best diagnostic system for a website is a good, properly implemented, analytics package. Use the analytics package to monitor trends. If you have the ability to do user segmentation analysis, do it, the more granular you can get, the greater your ability to understand and monitor changes in the way your customers do business with you. At the same time, you need to monitor your competition, changes they make to their sites can affect the ranking of your site, and therefore the traffic to your site. Then, there’s the continual SEO optimization. Algorithms change, bad listings can deter people from clicking (reputation management), changes to your site, etc.
So, even when things are ticking along nicely, you need to make sure that you’re listening for any strange sounds and looking for something out of the ordinary, as you don’t want to be standing on the side of the information super highway, watching customers zoom off to other sites, as you sit there waiting for assistance…
