Website Visitation

A website is like a customer facing retail store where success depends on increasing visitation across different cross sections: customers, prospects and loyalists. Generally a website exists for external communication; boosting repeat site visitation on a long term basis is fundamental to sustaining higher returns from your website investment.

Like an interactive storefront, increased website visitation is a great learning platform for business owners; as you can gain valuable insights into evolving consumer behaviour from site visitation statistics. Focusing on increasing site visitation forces businesses to increase their customer centricity as you continue to add more customer facing interactive features to increase the overall site appeal and viral marketing abilities of your website

A website is like a living business ally that needs to be fed with the latest (user- demanded) content, best-in-class technologies (user-friendly) and unique design aesthetics (user appealing) to sustain regular user interest and boost repeat visitation consistently.

Website Marketing

People love popular brands and websites, coordinated online and offline marketing is needed consistently to increase its repeat visitation. Strategically your website needs to be positioned in the right consumer demanded niche i.e. industry vertical (automotive, IT services etc), consumer needs (education, travel, housing etc) and its details need to be registered with the respective industry association, city/geographic listings and relevant directories (skills, industry, customer category). It is also helpful to post your website details to niche search engines and relevant communities/forums/blogs on different social networking sites. Successful website marketing sustains visitor interest by making the web-contents available in places where the target audience regularly visits. Offline PR, advertisements and event participation also helps boost site popularity by positioning it as a useful tool with new upgraded features for the target audience, and this in turn sustains repeat visitation in the long run. 

Website Experience

Enhancing user experience and adding incentives for visitation greatly boost repeat visits. User experience can be enhanced by adding well researched blogs, whitepapers, newsletters and content that enriches the target audience. Some web marketers create excitement with regularly updated contests, info-treasure hunts and ‘incentivised surveys’ to entice people to keep visiting their sites for more. It also helps to post expert articles on different article directories with back links to your site. This not only builds site traffic but also positions you as an expert in a particular field and if you keep adding fresh (relevant) content and unique insights to your website, people will keep coming again.

Innovative web marketers ask for e-mail addresses of visitors (by giving incentives like a free whitepaper or a newsletter), they then send out info-mailers to their registered users to visit the site again for great new content/features. Having an interactive banner advertisement on your own website using rich media technologies for enhanced user experience also boosts repeat visitation as people respond to its audio-video appeal. With the widespread use of broadband internet connectivity, this feature can be leveraged effectively today more than ever

A careful analysis of your website traffic statistics tells you which sections attract the least traffic and you need to enhance their user appeal (content, visuals and technology i.e. rich media) considerably. A comprehensive competitive analysis keeps you informed on the recent web features which competition maybe adding and you may have missed. To boost the returns on your website investment you need to consistently boost repeat visitation through a balanced mix of marketing, marketing intelligence and enhanced user experience innovations on a sustained basis.

As a business you should allocate web resources for tactical changes to your website so you can be responsive to customer demands and market opportunities. One of the most common mistakes is embarking on a website re-design project which takes 3-6 months, implement the changes and then embark on a similar re-deign in 6-12 months.

The Internet today is a serious sales channel and dedicating resources to the continuous improvement of your website is very similar to the reason you run a sales meeting every week to continually monitor how your can improve your companies sales performance. Registered users or members of your email database are generally the “lowest hanging fruit” when it comes to new sales opportunities for your business.