Webinar Recap: Live Website Optimization

Earlier today our lead marketing consultant, Randa Codron, presented a web seminar on website optimization. The webinar was one of our workshop-style presentations that we hold every few months where we encourage users to send us their websites and we then analyze them for free during the course of the webinar. Today’s webinar featured websites in the education, insurance and healthcare technology industry.

As usual after each webinar we present we put the questions we received during the webinar into a blog post for those of you who were unable to make it to the seminar.

1. What types of things have the best results in terms of optimizing? If you want to see quick results the best option is to optimize for conversion rate and SEO. Optimizing your landing pages, calls-to-action and forms can help you convert more leads and SEO can help to drive those leads to your website in the first place.
2. Where do measurement and analytics come in to website optimization? Without an accurate depiction of what works and what doesn’t it will be very difficult for you to optimize your website for get an idea of where you need to improve. Tools like Google Analytics can help you get a better idea of areas where you need to improve. 
3. How do I decide which keywords to use? Choosing your keywords carefully is on the most important steps when determining your SEO strategy and there are several different tactics for narrowing down the best ones. Brainstorming is a good way to get started, but after that there are plenty of free and paid online tools to help you generate keywords and determine which ones you should choose. You’re analytics are a good place to start as well (if you have them set up). Understanding what people are already using to find your website is a good way to narrow down your keyword strategy. Make sure when you choose your keywords you choose based on relevance and achievability. Just because a keyword is relevant for your website doesn’t mean you will necessarily rank for it. The more popular the keyword is, the less likely you will rank highly for it.
4. How much should content be geared towards mobile devices? When it comes to mobile, it isn’t so much about having content that is optimized but about having a website that is. Many mobile devices have problems rendering websites and any Apple “I” products (iPad, iPhone) won’t render things like flash. Mobile is such an important way to access the web and is only growing in popularity, if your entire website isn’t optimized you may be alienating a large portion of your target audience. 
5. I want to redesign my website using a CMS. How do I convince management to make this investment? Successful websites are fluid. To succeed online a website needs to be constantly evolving, updating and improving and if your website isn’t easy to update and manage, this task becomes difficult. By implementing a CMS you can put control of the website back in the hands of marketers allowing them to make strategic updates on the fly. 

Posted by Amberlie Denny at January 20, 2011 1:15 PM

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