By Armin Braunsberger of Braunsberger Media Digital

Launching a website is like planting a seed in the rainforest. Countless flowers are trying to get in reach of a sunbeam while growing under different conditions.

The Digital Jungle: There are marketers (and predators) crawling all around with offers to jump on their back and take the fast track toward visibility.  But how to get seen from the sky and even from the right audience? — **The Digital Jungle:** There are marketers (and predators) crawling all around with offers to jump on their back and take the fast track toward visibility.  But how to get seen from the sky and even from the right audience?

Investing in the right professional cannot replace the awareness or fundamental online marketing knowledge that separates healthy growth from stagnancy. Many little actions will turn into big results, simply by applying the right communication or understanding visitor data. This article covers the performance essentials for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) to build a solid online strategy.   

By breaking down the fundamental physics of any ambitious website strategy, success depends on three pillars that are in constant correlation and movement.

A) The Demand

In many business plans, the demand gets easily overrated at a blurred line with visionary thoughts and goals. But this is not just bad, because every good idea deserves a resistant momentum, and requires imperturbable founders that maneuver through a sea of doubts and pettiness. It is not unlikely that only a small percentage of website visitors convert into customers simply because a natural spreading loss is tied to every online presence. The existence of countless shady online coaches - entreating to share their secrets - spotlights an important lesson for all fresh website owners. The key is to create relevant visibility so you still reach a goal with a conversion rate of e.g. 5%. Overrating the demand, to a certain point, can be compensated by getting the math right with the other two pillars.

B) Investment of Time

It is very important to find a routine that leads to results and overcomes the first wave of excitement. It is essential to position all activities and the website structure around the primary goal. This could simply be the gaining of traffic or creating awareness for your content. Monetization often requires a certain reach first. For instance, building an excited community for a new product can result in successful crowd-funding or pre-orders. Many websites invest time in service-enriching content strategies. We have evaluated 1200 websites of SMB owners in the last two years that included a blog, news, or articles section (on systems like WIX, Squarespace, WordPress, Joomla, Shopify …). 85% showed a massive drop at the publishing rate - already after three months. This is mostly not the website’s fault and more likely the absence of a mid-term communication strategy.  That remaining 15% either found a realistic routine, (like preparing multiple articles at once instead of finding time once a week) or simply outsourced the task to a designated team member or an external partner while focussing on the primary business.  

Too high ambitions for digital publishing can easily lead to frustration - especially while facing very little reach and manpower at the beginning. Too low ambitions usually lead to little or no results. The key is consistency in relation to the importance of the website. Small but steady actions can easily set you ahead of your competition.

There is also The Rule of 7 - a classic number in the marketing book. This number stands for the average of required touchpoints for a user to consider a buying or request decision. Typical clients are unconsciously observing your content for quite a while before even thinking about buying it. It is crucial to remain visible until the number of interactions has made it beyond the Tipping Point Author, Malcolm Gladwell, describes the magic moment where small things can lead to big impacts and this threshold needs to be fed by reasonable activities.

C) Financial Investment & Marketing Budget for SMBs

The need for a marketing budget doesn’t imply that an idea is not good enough. Investing in the right marketplaces (like social media) can trigger the visibility that might otherwise take you years to grow. Most functional, growing businesses require solid marketing plans, while there are unicorns that attract their audience like magic (unexpected, high demand). But it is like unicorns to move between rare and non-existing. Your own excitement about the content or products has to be transferred to your audience in the right language. This process can take a couple of tries until the website communication is in line with your audience's understanding and expectations.

Media spending is a delicate thing at the beginning. A new brand identity or marketing appearance might feel right but it requires pragmatic market feedback to prove that. It is reckless to kickstart the media spending too progressively at the beginning. An online strategy is an integral part of (almost all) businesses in the 21st century and should point out the importance of having an understanding of online marketing.

Social media campaign tools have become more and more user-friendly. In the beginning, campaigning is usually happening on a limited budget, so it is a good approach to keep the media planning/spending in-house at first. Still, you will benefit from hiring professionals while building a necessary skillset for your distribution.  

First of all, a good website is about communication. The design and structure should carry the fundamental purpose. A website cannnot be designed properly before fully understanding the audience.

The landing page should get 50% of the attention in every website planning process. This is the actual selling point where clients make their decision - often before even knowing it. Everything behind the landing page is consolidating that decision.  A website should follow the verbal “pitching approach“ on how you would explain it to somebody. There is usually no reason for changing the strategy or even leaving out the important aspects.

While it sounds logical, the majority of SMB websites don’t live by that rule. Too often, fundamental information is missing. Like with a shop where you take a look through the window before entering it, the landing page has to paint a clear picture of what to expect to increase the chance of interaction.  Instead, websites often transfer the responsibility to the visitor by forcing the guest to gather the information him/herself. In this worst case, the landing page doesn’t provide more than a warm welcome. The visitor starts clicking through the top navigation and has already taken the matter into their own hands. This also means that the site owner is no longer in charge of the narrative and the sequence of how the information is consumed. As a result, the conversion is drastically reduced simply by the fact, that not every visitor is following the best-practice guideline.  

Understand the Rules before Breaking them.

Even Steve Jobs had to think through established sales funnels and psychology before thinking different.
Just because an artist has a certain way of painting, it does not mean that the marketing physics is unique for selling his paintings. The sales experience should always be transferred from the real business into the digital business at an almost equal level. A good website should have a clear CTA (call-to-action) and the whole website architecture should support this strategy by simply being cool, informative, entertaining, or functional.

Dispensing a CTA is not as elegant as it might feel to a site owner. It is more likely a sign of indecisiveness that will result in poor website performance. If you want your audience to follow you or to make a subscription, use clear communication at a well-considered moment. A pretty common method of many online shops is to trigger a popup after 3-5 seconds. While this aggressively asks for new newsletter subscriptions, it creates an even higher hidden figure of annoyed visitors that haven’t even had the chance to read the headline. A more clever approach is to fine-tune such tools by simply questioning each action. It can be more efficient to show certain offers only on certain pages that are in line with the level of interest or knowledge. For instance, show a newsletter subscription only on deeper levels of the website when a visitor enters the ABOUT or SERVICES page. This might reduce the subscription quantity but will increase the quality of a mailing list.

**CHAPTER 3**

From Analytics to Performance

The options for obtaining feedback on your website or even understanding your visitors might feel quite limited at first. But there is a great deal of valuable data that just needs to be interpreted the right way. The following paragraphs introduce the basics of website analytic.

Site Traffic 

The site traffic is usually the first number to measure success. The general traffic analysis is a great way of evaluating general responses to your actions by putting those numbers in correlation with timeframes. It’s crucial to a marketing campaign to understand what time your audience is most active. Campaign performance can easily be evaluated by cross-referencing it with site traffic and is the pre-step of a conversion. Commonly, the site traffic has ups and downs like a NASDAQ stock, but the average performance should show a growing trend - If not, at least 2 of the 3 pillars are not at a sufficient level. Usually, website traffic is measured in views per page whilst smart analytic tools disentangle unique visitors from that data pool. This prevents heavy users (like staff members) being counted as hundreds of fictional visitors.

 Desktop/Mobile Ratio

What is the primary device for consuming your content? B2B usually websites have a higher desktop share while B2C websites start showing +50% mobile traffic. Depending on the individual situation, the website should provide a great mobile performance up to a “mobile-first“ development. That means the whole website will be designed primarily for a smartphone while still keeping the desktop experience in mind. It is often a good advanced action to exclude several content sections on mobile for a more focussed experience, or even establishing the content in a mobile-aware way. In an ideal scenario, all mediums are covered perfectly but that is often just a matter of budget and can easily exceed the initial website contract with an agency or web designer. So it’s advised to cover this topic in a briefing while a good mobile experience can be presupposed anyway at the current standards of website building.

The Bounce Rate

 This percentage number is extremely valuable. It describes the ratio of visitors that enter your website and leave it without clicking any further pages. A high bounce rate stands for two scenarios: 

Visitors have not found what they were looking for and left without the desire of learning more.
If social media activities brought traffic to the landing page, that’s already 2/3 of the way. High Bounce Rates can be lowered by painting a clear picture of your target audience first, and improve the content accordingly.
Visitors only consumed the content on this specific page and simply left.
If a blog post brought traffic to the website, a CTA (call-to-action) at the bottom should be considered to funnel the traffic into further actions like a request, community growth, or browsing further products. Showing related content or a simple author profile can lead to higher engagement toward the initial website purpose. We have to assume that a visitor knows nothing about you or your business while entering through Google search. Make sure you fill that gap with the right information to increase the chance of further clicks.

This can be improved by making sure that the site preview is sharp and clear. The Bounce Rate can’t be streamlined to zero because there will always be visitors that were looking for something completely different and just landed on your website by accident. Still, it is good to try to lower it with little improvements on your site.

The Exit Rate

 The Exit Rate - mostly in percentage - is the ratio of visitors that leave your website on this particular page.  In the best case, a high exit rate only occurs e.g. at the shop checkout or after an action has been carried out. Every website owner can learn about his/her business by questioning the point where your visitor simply left you. There are always individual reasons for high Exit Rates but they are always of informative value and to find the weak spots in your customer journey. This can indicate unexpected pricing or overwhelming information.   

Conversions

This should be the primary measure to evaluate success. This can also be highly interesting for websites  besides e-commerce. Make sure to have a website architecture that helps you gather information. For instance, the website system Squarespace tracks the clicks of every individual button. To benefit from this rich information, make sure to house actions like „Learn More, Read More, Contact Sales, Browse the Full Collection, Meet The Team“ by rarifying the comprehensible steps of the website journey. This helps to understand where visitors follow the blueprint and where the journey gets blurry.

There are also many advanced analytics tools on the market like Hotjar that provide heat maps, but make sure that this is covered by the websites privacy policy.  

The Conversion Funnel

It is very common that the conversion funnel looks frustrating to a new website owner. There is a natural divergence loss with every website. This funnel provides the blunt facts for all relevant steps of a customer journey.

If the purpose of the website is concentrated on a service, make sure to gather the missing pieces manually. Due to the natural social connections outside the web, services can have a highly undocumented proportion. For instance, instruct your assistant to ask new clients how they found you and include that information in your conversion analysis. Personal recommendations are still the most efficient source for action and can turn the Rule of 7 into the Rule of 1 or 2.

 All Industry Newsletter Performance

The average opening rate of a Newsletter:

18%

The average click-through rate:

2.6%.

Read the full report by Campaign Monitor

With that in mind, it is obvious that a satisfying result requires a certain number of contacts to forecast any real success. The list quality can still excel the quantity.

Page Charts

This is a crucial piece of information on trending content within a website. It is pretty common that the ABOUT page outranks the SERVICES page on SMB websites, simply based on the fact of curiosity and confidence-retrieval. These charts visualize trending topics while this can easily deviate from internal expectations. For instance, it is advised to show the managing team with best possible transparency because the human factor is beneficial for creating confidence. Otherwise, potential clients might wonder if there is a reason for your hiding. Higher Bounce or Exit Rates will reflect that lack of personality or transparency.

**CHAPTER 4**

   Search Engine Optimization

SEO should be an integral part of every ambitious website and covers a sum of small tasks that improve the communication of your website with your audience - mostly through Google.  

There are more than 200 factors in Google’s algorithm that evaluate your website and lead to a certain ranking. Most of them will already be covered by building a solid, engaging, and content-rich website. For instance, having an „Enter Website“ splash page in between is a big mistake and simply offers no valuable information to Google that pays close attention to the content quality of the landing page. While a rich landing page provides a good user experience, it is also valuable for search engine crawlers to find relevant information that leads to an efficient matching with your audience. Here are a couple of highlights to consider:

User Experience

Simply provide sufficient information like the latest news, featured topics, or previews to help your audience see the big picture. The longer visitors have been browsing through your site, the better. This can be supported by building content loops with modules like see related topics, browse further products, see all pictures, meet our team, and many more. It’s also important to feed the website with content updates. Changes to the content, or even new content, will be appreciated during the evaluation, while a simple change of the sequence will have a lower impact. A rich bundle of different media like videos, photos, or further multimedia elements is supportive for your content-quality ranking.

Tags & Content

Google shifted its focus more towards the visitor perspective. As a result, meta tags became less important. Also, the content length is a SERP (search engine ranking position) factor. In simple words: if there is no information and description, it can’t be that important, right?

Loading Speed

Proper image compression and technical setup should ensure that the website loads as fast as possible. The Google Page Speed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights) provides a report of your website within seconds. Content-heavy websites- even major ones - often have a low score but that doesn’t necessarily mean a bad ranking and often incorporates recommendations by Google.   

Mobile Performance

A good smartphone performance gets more and more attention in the Google algorithm and is a very important factor of the ranking.

Back/Cross Links

Other websites that refer to your website are beneficial like e.g. partner profiles or features or social media channels. The more people speak about your website the better for your ranking. Running a good social media strategy can be very beneficial for your rating. 

Summary

The sum of small actions leads to substantial results.

Question what is (really) interesting content for your audience.

Find a constant routine (no matter how much or little time) for improving your online appearance.

Build in-house online skills (social media, website management, media spending).

Be open to new tools and channels as the online environment is growing and evolving.

Learn from your website traffic.

Learn from your Bounce Rate.

Learn from your Exit Rate .

Written by:
Featured Leaders Lodge Member

Armin Braunsberger
Leading Squarespace Designer
Designer, Online-Consultant

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The Website Performance Blueprint for SMBs

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Launching a website is like planting a seed in the rainforest. Countless flowers are trying to get in reach of a sunbeam while growing under different conditions. Many little actions will turn into big results, simply by applying the right communication or understanding visitor data. This article covers the performance essentials for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) to build a solid online strategy.   