The web is one of the most powerful communication and promotional channels you can use to boost sales for your business, but many business owners feel that working on improving their website is too complicated, they are too busy or that its too costly.

Today, I’ll go through some common questions that clients ask and give you some easy tips to improve your online marketing and website performance using free online tools.

1. I want to see how many people go to my site
Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics are excellent free tools which show you how many people visit your site and can display this information according to date, common search terms and how long they spend on your site.

These can also be handy for measuring the performance of your promotions by seeing if more people visit your site during the time the promotion is on offer and if they spend more time browsing your site.

2. I want to see how my site performs in search engines
Did you know that the major search engines provide free tools which identify how your site is performing in search engine results and ways to improve it?

Google’s Webmaster Central is probably the most widely used site enhancement toolkit which allows you to see how Google indexes your site content and discover who links to your site. Most importantly, Google provides content analysis to guide you on how to improve your site for better search rankings. Another similar toolkit is Yahoo Site Explorer.

3. I want to find out what customers are looking for
How do you know if you are offering what customers really want or if your marketing is aligned with your target markets? An excellent way to conduct such market research is to look at what people are entering as search terms.

Suppose you run a flower shop in South Australia and so your website is all about flowers. You may already rank on the first search page for the search term “flowers”, but through a keyword search tool you find out there are a lot of people searching for “roses” and “roses South Australia”. It would be in your best interest to change your sales and marketing pitch to include the latter two search terms.

There are many tools for identifying keywords including Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker and Google Adwords. Google Adwords’ keyword selection feature which not only gives you a comprehensive list of other keywords that relate to your business but also shows you how many people and the peak month they use these in the search engine.

4. I want my site to rank higher in search results
Why is this important? Because very few people know the exact web address they are after. Most people use the search function in search engines to bring up a list of sites matching what they are looking for.

Once you’ve identified the top ten or so search terms that your site should rankly highly for, you should then check how well your site ranks for each. You can either use a tool like Search Status or you can type in each search terms individually and have a look at where you site is ranked.

To improve your rankings for your chosen search terms you can either use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or a combination of the two.

SEO refers to non-paid natural or organic search results. One way to improve your SEO is to re-write the content on your site to include your chosen keywords.

SEM is basically when you pay for listings against chosen keywords, often these will appear as “sponsored links” at the top or the right hand side of a search engine page. Once again, Google Adwords can help you (and at the same time, you can avoid paying management fees from SEM agencies).

5. I want to see how my competitors’ sites are performing
How do you know if your website traffic is reasonable? How does your site compare against competitors? Use Search Status to find out. This tool allows you to see how any website in the world is performing.

There are many other reputable free online tools available to help you improve your website performance and achieve a higher ROI from your online marketing. The key is to take small steps so that you avoid risks and also see the direct impact that a single change can make to improving traffic and sales from your website. If you know of any other useful free online tools, please tell us about them!

This article is brought to you by Australian Business Marketing Services, giving you no nonsense, results driven marketing at a price that you can afford. Contact us today on 1800 505 529 or via email for assistance with your marketing needs.

By Vanessa Tsui