10 things you should be monitoring on your website
Monitoring your website is a crucial aspect of running an online business.
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of monitoring key aspects of their website on an infrequent basis, which can lead to catastrophic consequences.
Here are 10 things you should be monitoring on your website:
#1 – Uptime Monitoring
A website not available for even one second, is a potential lost customer.
#2 – Error Tracking & Reporting Tools
You should be able to see the 404s, 500s and other error messages on your website. This will help you track down the specific error areas of your website and quickly fix them to gain more traffic.
#3 – Analytic Software Reports
Google Analytics is a great resource but there are numerous other analytic software tools you can use to monitor how many visitors are visiting your site, what they're looking at and where they're coming from.
#4 – Website Speed Monitoring Tools
A website that takes too long to load down is a potential lost customer. Although most of our visitors will wait for the page to load, some people will simply leave your site without looking at it's offerings. You could be missing out on potential customers and revenue because of slow loading times of your website.
#5 – Tracking & Reporting Tools
It's important to track and report back on all aspects of your business, so you can see how it's performing over time and make adjustments as necessary. It helps you calculate traffic goals, track potential mistakes and spot better ways to market yourself or your product.
#6 – Click Tracking Software
This will allow you to see where your visitors are clicking on the site. Also, it will tell you how many clicks your website is generating each day so you can see how effective your marketing campaigns are.
#7 – Google Analytic & Social Media Monitoring Tools
You should be continuously monitoring the effectiveness of your social media and blog promotion efforts using Google Analytics and Twitter tools. This allows you to track how far reaching your marketing campaign is and helps you optimize future efforts. It's also beneficial to monitor Social Media sites like Facebook as it's a great way to learn what other people are saying about your company or product.
#8 – WebPageTest
You should be monitoring the performance of your website to see how much traffic it's generating each day. WebPageTest will let you test all aspects of your site and see exactly what's working and what isn't. You can also use this tool to test parts of your site before upgrading, as you might have some slow areas that you want to improve upon.
#9 – Google Analytics & Google Search Console & MozCast Reports
This is a great way to ensure that everything on your website is properly linked, contains proper images and has the correct content so that search engines can find it easily. This also allows you to learn how much traffic your website is generating from search engines via Google Analytics.
#10 – Google PageSpeed Insights
This tool will analyze all aspects of your website to ensure it's extremely optimized for search engines. You should make sure that your website is running at a speed of 100/100 as this will greatly benefit you in terms of search engine optimization and deliverability, helping you rank higher in Google results.
#11 – Email Marketing Reports & Open Tracking
To make sure people are opening and reading the emails you're sending out, you should utilize email marketing software. You can use a variety of email marketing software that works seamlessly with your website.
#12 – Marketing Reports & Analytics Tools
This is where you can see how effective your marketing efforts are and see how many new customers you're adding to your database. You should be using multiple analytic tools to monitor the performance of your marketing campaign.
#13 – Google & Bing Webmaster Tools
Your website needs to be ranked in Google and Bing to effectively rank higher in search engine results and get more traffic. Therefore, it's important that you utilize Webmaster Tools to keep track of how well your site is ranking in Google, and make any necessary changes on a regular basis.
#14 – Social Bookmarking Tools
Webmasters should be constantly monitoring their social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. These are some of the most well-known social bookmarking sites on the web and they will greatly benefit your company if you're able to keep your site at the top of search engine results for these sites.
#15 – Web Developer Tools
When you're running your own website, it's good to be in touch with a web developer that can help you make major changes to parts of your website that need updating or correcting. This will save you time and money, as a website that is not up to date and related issues will be an overall negative for all users.
#16 – Website Maintenance
It's important to make sure that you have a maintenance plan for your website. This is something that no one can do for you, as it's a part of running a successful business and you should be releasing more content and updating the information on your website as often as possible. You can easily outsource this for a small monthly fee.
#17 – Website Promotion
You need to be constantly promoting your content on your website, so it stays at the top of search engine results and people keep visiting it. You should be utilizing social media like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest in order to promote your products or services on these sites.
#18 – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a great way to generate new leads for your website. You can build relationships with people in the niche you're targeting so they're your potential customers. You can then promote their content and products on your website to get visitors from their site. Furthermore, you can also create an affiliate link that will direct traffic directly to their site, another great way to keep visitors coming back.
#19 – Promote Product Reviews & Create Your Own Niche Site
It's good if you create a product review page on your website so that people can quickly read about the pros and cons of every product so they make an informed buying decision before going through with it.
Conclusion
If you start marketing your website correctly, it will become an extremely successful business that generates more leads for you, helps retain more of your customers and attracts a wider range of recruits. The above tips and tricks will get you started with the most effective strategies to get you there.
I would like to add that whether you're doing affiliate marketing or selling products on your website, it is still important to make sure your business has a legal name and address. This way, if anything were to happen in the future when there are any issues with the domain where you're doing business from, tax authorities or any other potential legal issues that could arise, they will be able to catch up with you easily.