Farm Fresh
Website Metrics
If you’ve taken the time to create your own website — or had someone else create it for you — you’re invested in maintaining an online presence outside of Facebook, Instagram and the other usual suspects. But how can you be sure potential visitors not only can find you online but also like what they see?
Following some basic best practices can make a difference. So can taking advantage of some of the sophisticated — and free! — online tools which offer valuable insights into users’ experiences with your website. Of course, knowing exactly where you should start depends on the goals you have for your website.
Attracting Locals
Unless you sell nonperishable products such as homemade soap or homespun yarn, odds are you hope to attract local customers via your online presence. That goes double for farm businesses, which welcome drop-in customers or farms hosting regular tours and special events.
In order to capture customers in your geographical area, work to improve your ranking on Google Maps. “[That] can be very powerful in bringing more traffic and encouraging conversions,” says Steve Kurniawan, a content specialist and growth strategist for Nine Peaks Media, a Toronto-based digital marketing agency. “The idea is to get your Google Maps listing on the top three results, according to your location.”
He lays out some simple steps to accomplish this. First, create a free listing for your farm business on Google My Business. Do likewise for as many other free, online business directories as you can. (A few others include Yelp for Business Owners, Bing Places for Business and Facebook Business.) “The key here is to maintain consistency in name, business, and phone number information,” Kurniawan says.
“The website needs to validate the stuff that’s in Google My Business,” says Joshua Sloan, a digital strategist, web developer, and owner of Sloan Tech Digital Consultancy in Bally, Pennsylvania. “So, if you spell ‘Street’ with ‘St.’ on Google My Business, you need to spell it on your website with ‘St.’ It’s very finicky.”
Next? Encourage your customers to share positive reviews about your business on Facebook and the other platforms they commonly use. “Google My Business will find those Facebook reviews and blend them into your Google My Business listing,” Sloan says.
The result? Good reviews left in conjunction with your Google Maps, Facebook Business and other online business listings further boosts your visibility with local audiences online. (Incidentally, you should also schedule time to monitor customer reviews and respond to any not-so-positive notes you see as quickly — and effectively — as you can. According to Google My Business research, businesses that respond to reviews are thought to be nearly twice as trustworthy as businesses that don’t.)
Other Best Practices
To make sure your online efforts are effective, you also should monitor your website traffic sources. Google Analytics is one robust, free tool at your disposal; however, it takes some technical proficiency to implement.
Lewis Peters is a digital marketing executive with Online Turf, a U.K.-based sod farm that primarily sells its products online. “Google Analytics can give you great insight on how your site is performing and what your audience is doing on your website,” he says. “With this data, you will know how popular your pages are and exactly what pages could have room for improvement.”
Peters notes that Google Search Console is another powerful, free — albeit underutilized — tool you can leverage for details about your website’s overall standing. “[Google Search Console] can alert you if your site happens to be penalized by Google or has any security issues that need to be addressed,” he says. “It also lets you how your site is performing in search and what search queries your users have performed to find your site and average ranking position.”
If you’ve already been using Google Analytics and recently have noticed some negative traffic trends, you’re not alone. “If your experience is, ‘It used to be better, and now it’s not as good,’ we should talk about that,” Sloan says. “The internet has changed. Ever since Google put an artificial intelligence program in charge of search rankings, all bets are off.”
Strategically incorporating keywords throughout one’s website used to positively influence its placement in Google search results, but there are many other variables at work now. For instance, beginning July 1,
2019, Google officially switched to its “mobile-first indexing” preference. That means, if your website hasn’t been designed to display properly on mobile phones, Google will rank other websites more highly than yours when returning search results. You can test your website’s mobile-friendliness with an online tool available through the Google Search Console. Need improvement? Some plug-ins are available to make older websites more mobile-friendly. Google also prefers websites with security certificates associated with their domains. “That’s not just the credit card page and not just the contact page,” Sloan says. “Google wants every page of your website to be ‘HTTPS.’” Provided you have a dedicated website domain, you can purchase a special security certificate through your website hosting company. Some hosts will help you activate and install your certificate. Others might expect you (or your website developer) to handle these steps.
Advanced Tracking
If your website attracts 100-plus visitors daily, you might be ready to implement the kinds of website-monitoring tools that professional marketing firms use. Wish you could see where your visitors lose interest or lose their way? Heat-mapping tools such as Hotjar show you where your users most often pause and click, how far into your content they scroll and more.
Besides heat-mapping, sites such as Mouseflow actually record website sessions, so you can see individual visitors interacting with your content. Hotjar and Mouseflow offer free trial plans, but look around and you’ll find similar services with free and low-cost basic plans.
“Unless you’re prepared to make a decision, all the data in the world is not helpful,” Sloan says. So, no matter which website-monitoring tools you try, be prepared to make changes to your content as needed and, yes, keep testing!