Website: Metrics, Testing, Analytics

There are endless ways to test, analyze, and evaluate your website's performance, but most importantly, start somewhere. Then keep testing.

SE ut O!

Search engine optimization or SEO can be your best friend or the devil.

It's about where you are listed when people search a keyword or words on a topic and either find you…or not.

A first-page listing is imperative if you want to gain any search engine (known as organic) traffic (or visitors) to your site. With all the sites out there, and growing every day, it's not as easy as you would hope to get that coveted top spot.

My absolute favorite SEO tool is WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast because it helps you learn about meta tags, meta descriptions, title text and so much more as you use it.

The helpful Yoast even scores you as you go so that you know if you are optimizing your work to the fullest, before hitting the publish button.

SE ut O! The key to SEO is quality content.

The key to SEO is quality content. These sources will explain things for a much better understanding:

I'll let one of my favorite writers, Barry Feldman, explain more to simplify SEO for you and tell why it's so important, too

Noah Kagan, taco eating chief at AppSumo, shares this SEO wisdom on his okdork website and anyone would be happy to do even a little bit as well as Noah when it comes to internet sales and marketing.

And when Sharon Hurley Hall covers a topic, like SEO and CRO on CrazyEgg, you (no doubt) learn things, most likely lots of things! (CRO = conversion rate optimization)

T E S T graphic for Business Meet Website by Sue-Ann Bubacz

KEYWORDS, KEYWORD PLANNING AND LONGTAIL KEYWORDS

When you talk about SEO you may have noticed, you will hear the words “keyword or words, keyword planning and longtail or LT keywords," a lot.

That's because keywords are the…well, key to SEO.

Andy Crestodina, Strategic Director of Orbit Media, seems like a pretty analytical sort of guy, in this article and video, he offers you a 5 minute trick to working with keywords through Google Analytics (more on that in a minute) detailing how to improve your SEO.

This post on tools for blogging gives about a dozen sources for SEO, keywords, and keyword planners and more, for just about everything you may want to know for your SEO/keyword research, all in one place.

Maybe I should mention that what works for SEO practices, constantly changes.

SEO and keyword research are important to look at and consider before publishing content, pages and posts on your website. This is a part of your content marketing creation and website strategy that is done behind the scenes.

In a way, you begin working on your analytics from the inside, out, to get notice.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS AND WEBSITE METRICS

Using Google Analytics is part of having a website.

Don't panic if you don't have it in place on day one, but the reason it's so important is because it's about metrics. It measures lots of good information and gives you mega data on visitors and where they spend time on your site.

You can see what devices people are on when they visit, what browser they are using, get demographics about your audience, and measure any number of things that you set up.

Feel free to try it out, even before you really know how it works, because it's quite interesting and you're prone to learn something immediately. Oh, and it's free.

Here's Andy from Demand Studios again to tell you exactly How to Setup Google Analytics.

These guys specialize in Google Analytics, so here's All About Google Analytics Reports from Mercer at Seriously Simple Marketing. Mercer and his team are super helpful if you want to pursue more analytics information, at just about any level, I think. Check them out!

But, you should specialize in analytics, too, so you can continuously improve your small business website by mining the data presented in the analytics and understanding customer behaviors.

Take it a step further by evaluating results and using what you learn to change and improve on your site. Make this a consistent and documented process to be most useful. And that leads us to the value of testing.

A/B or SPLIT TESTING AND KPI's

When you talk about metrics and analytics, you have to talk about KPIs.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) help you set goals and objectives to determine what to measure and the most important things to analyze.

There's a bit of a debate, for example, as to whether Twitter shares indicate any actual readership of blog posts and articles that are shared or retweeted, and yet another debate is about click rate as a measure of advertising effectiveness.

Both examples point out the most critical insights about setting up your site's KPI's and metrics so that you are sure to collect meaningful data that you can use to apply improvements to increase your conversion rates and, ultimately, sales.

One way to accurately find out what truly works best and resonates with your audience is to do A/B or Split Testing. You can use this to test one page design against another, headlines or other copy versions, even CTA (call-to-action) button text or color.

Christina Gillick walks you through 5 Simple Steps to A/B Testing in this article, and you can see a more in-depth study co-produced by MCCLABS Institute &marketing experiments in this guide: The A-Z of A/B Testing: Marketing and Online Testing Dictionary.

Set to Launch?

Whew. Well, I think that covers what you need to know, basically, to get your small business website up and flying, for the perfect small business website launch.

Are you set for the countdown to begin? Is it time for your NEW small business website or website upgrade?

I hope this helps answer your questions and fuels your passion for that small business website launch so your company soars on the World Wide Web. Now. Anything else?