While Ron Popeil has created some great inventions and pioneered the informercial as medium, he’s not the man to look to for your web strategy.

If you grew up in the 80’s and early 90’s you probably remember his Showtime Rotisserie, a counter-top appliance you could use to make roast chicken, turkey, or lamb with no fuss or muss, you just “Set it, and forget it!” While this is a great strategy for easy, delicious meals that make clean up snap it’s not going to get you more leads and generate new business from your site.

Many people look at their website like an online brochure, they design it, launch it and forget about it; hoping it will quietly do its work in the background.

“But I have blog I update regulary”
Fresh content is great for SEO: it can help drive traffic to your site and establish you as an expert in your field. But what does the visitor do when they get to your site?

“I have a call to action on all my pages” you say (you do have CTAs don’t’ you?). That’s great, you have fresh content and CTAs but are they optimized. Even with a blog/site focussed on conversion if you’re not continually testing and optimizing your site you’re just “setting it, and forgetting it.”

A truly robust web strategy includes a/b tests and on-page optimization to continually improve conversion rates, increase ROI and enhance user experience.

Remember this one of the areas where digital outshines traditional media. You can measure things like time on site, pages vistied, keywords used to find your site. Setting up goals for your visitor and tracking them means you can optimize those goal funnels. Try doing that quickly or without spending a fortune using print ads or radio spots.

Many digital agencies include monthly or annual maintenance fees when the design site, but all they’re usually doing is applying security patches and fixing any rendering issues that arise from browser updates. If you want to truly maximize the cost of ownership of your site you need to be continually improving it: changing CTA’s, updating supporting copy, tweaking colours. Remember, the blue google uses for link text was tested and optimized to find the specific shade that produced the best click-through rate. On-page optimizations can be as simple as that. Does the CTA work better as green one or green two. You don’t need to do a whole new version of the page.

Contact GTM today to see how we can help you maximize the ROI of your website and increase your conversions or check out this great primer on a/b testing by my friend at The Analytic Eye: Moneyball, Dating Websites and 6 Ways Data Can Help You Avoid Irrational Decisions.