Website Performance Tools to Grow Your Business

I will outline what the tools are and what they are generally used for. If you have any installation issues, feel free to ask me to look into any issues you may have.

If you are looking to do a bit of marketing for your website, check out our breakdown of the key metrics you need to be looking out for with these 5 marketing packages for small business growth.

Tool 1: Google Analytics

This should be installed right after you have bought your domain and have your website up and ready. It takes 5 minutes to set up but you will become reliant on it as much as the gas you put in your car. Google Analytics has recently changed slightly but all the essential tracking information is still there.

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The key performance indicators you will need once you have google analytics installed are:

• - Sessions (overall number of people visiting your website)
• - Users (unique people visiting your website)
• - % New Sessions (will tell you if your business is growing)

As you start growing your website and the number of Referrals increases, you will need to look at setting up Goals. Goals will allow you to clearly see which channels are converting the best e.g. you can set up registration goals or purchase completion goals.  If your website sells products, you might want to create custom reports to share with colleagues about the sales figures coming through your website.

See below where to find Google Analytics customisation tabs. Google Analytics customisation

 By having Google analytics set up, you can start working on your marketing plan. If you have 1,000 New Users per month and you've had 50 sign-ups, your conversion rate is 5/1,000 x 100 = 5%

You want to ensure that the conversion rate is as low as possible because if for those 1,000 users you paid £100 (0.10p per click) then it means you paid £2 for a person to sign up on your website. By having these stats you can negotiate relevant marketing campaigns to grow your business affordably.

Another obvious reason why you need Google Analytics is so you can see month-on-month the performance of your business, and if one day your sales shoot up, the first thing you need to do is check your google analytics to see if there is an increase in traffic for that particular day.

As your website grows you will be able to understand a lot more about the demographic of your customers, including which devices they use to browse your website, and which pages they view (you can even set up a goal to show you how many people view more than 5 pages of your website). All of this data will help you shape your customer funnel and tailor the user journey. Once you are comfortable with Google Analytics, make sure to set it up with Google Adwords when you start advertising, it will help keep costs down and drive optimal performance.

Tool 2: Webmaster Tools

This will ensure your website has all the things it needs for its online presence to grow. Also, as you grow your content (either in a form of product pages or a blog) you will be able to track the exact keywords people are finding on your website and you can clearly see the most clicked-on pages of your website.

3 things you need to use webmaster tools for:

1. Submitting your sitemap so that Google bots can easily index your website

2. Adding keywords that people are searching to find your website in your content

3. Get your website pages indexed faster, by fetching the web page as google and then submitting it to get indexed.

Tool 3: Google Keyword Planner

This will ensure your website is accessible for the right keywords. You can simply enter your competitor's website to find keywords that are associated with their website, or list the keywords that describe your business to see how much search traffic each keyword consists of.

This is a great tool to grow organic search traffic and it's a handy tool for google ad words. If you sell products on your website in different categories, it's worth creating separate pages with keyword optimised content to drive new organic traffic just for those specific categories.

Tool 4: Open Site Explorer - Moz

Simply enter your URL into the search bar to get valuable data like your domain authority (the closer you get to 100 the easier it will be to rank for keywords). Also, you can see the number of website pages linking to your website and what their domain ranks are (the more high domain sites that link to yours, the higher your domain authority would be). This is also a handy tool to check what your competition is doing and what kind of websites are linking to their domain.

Tool 5: PageSpeed Insights

This will ensure that all the content on your website is loading efficiently, this is especially important if you have a lot of images on your website. Simply entering your URL will tell you whether you need to alter your code from java to HTML or things that need to be done to get your site mobile-ready. You can test this service for yourself here.

So there are 5 tools that you should use at least once a month to ensure as your website grows your business grows with it. For the more technical performance indicators like byte load time, you can contact me for further guidance.