Your staffing website may look great, offer a great customer experience and contain powerful calls-to-action that drive response.
But if you don’t promote it correctly? That’s like getting dressed to the nines, just to wander around your own house.
Even the most beautiful, intuitive, well-written website can’t do its job if nobody finds it. So in this next 4-part series, I share ways to increase your staffing website’s ROI with great “promotion.” For the purposes of this discussion, the word “promotion” refers to anything you do to drive traffic to your website.
Related posts in this series:
Write Great Staffing Website Content
Drive More High-Quality Job Applications
Tip 1: Know Where Your Visitors Come from – and Where They Go!
Site analytics, especially Google Analytics, help you understand how visitors interact with your website. Obviously, your goal is to get people to take action (e.g., apply, request an employee, complete a form). When you review your site’s numbers, consider these key questions to identify areas for improvement:
How do people get to your site?
Are they coming directly to you from search engines or are they being referred from other sites?
What pages do they visit most frequently?
Your home page may be the most popular entry point, but you should also know your second and third. Your analytics can tell you which pages these are, as well as where people go to from these pages, so you know where to focus improvement efforts.
Where do they leave the site?
Clients and candidates will eventually leave your site, but make sure most of them take a desired action before they go. If too many leave before applying to a job or filling out a form, you need to make some changes to their exit points.
What is the conversion rate on your forms?
Pay special attention to how your forms are performing. Does a form on one part of your site outperform forms on other areas of your site? See what you can do to boost the results of the forms that are not producing.
Where can you make improvements?
Compare total traffic trends month to month, quarter to quarter, and current quarter versus the same quarter from the prior year. Then, make sure to put your findings in perspective (as staffing traffic can be very seasonal or influenced by the economy).
Examine your traffic sources, such as search, social, direct, referral or paid. If you are spending time online promoting your firm, determine if that is driving traffic to your business – or if people go to the pages you are driving social traffic to but do not go any further (bounce rate).
As you make changes in content, CTAs, forms or anything else to improve conversions, be systematic. Track the impact changes have on your analytics to see which perform best.
Case Study:
You Can’t Argue with Numbers: Measurable Results of Blogging
Using Google Analytics, our team showed this client the real impact blogging was having on their site’s performance – increasing traffic to their job seekers page 132%!
Want more in-depth information on website analytics?
Go to LunchWithHaley.com and check out our On-Demand webinars.
Up Next: Promoting Your Site with PPC and SEO
Don’t want to wait for the post to publish? Get the Idea Club Whitepaper: Staffing Websites: Maximize ROI with Great Content and Promotion here.