Small business can reap large rewards just from minor website changes.
Website optimization startup BoostSuite conducted a study of small business websites and found that bringing a website in line with search engine best practices can boost visitors by as much as 214 percent and purchases by as much as 146 percent.
“It gives a framework for businesses,” said Aaron Houghton, BoostSuite’s co-founder and CEO. “If it can increase visitors by 700 a month, it can help businesses decide how much to put into (search engine optimization) or website optimization.”
While it might seem intuitive that adjusting a business website would improve its performance, the figures measuring that performance are new. There’s surprisingly little industry measurements of website performance. Since data are owned by businesses, it’s hard to get the needed access to do a study. Houghton says the only entity that could do a thorough analysis of small business website data is probably Google.
BoostSuite’s business is helping websites identify and make changes to improve their traffic and increase the chances that visitors to the site take some sort of action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. The company accomplishes this with a subscription-based software that evaluates and grades websites on a scale of A+ to F, based on how well it’s doing. The software then provides businesses with recommendations. There are a lot of companies that help businesses improve website performance. But Houghton says most of those companies still overwhelm small businesses with more data and analytics than they can manage.
“We just don’t think that works when you’re working with marketing novices, which is what many small businesses are,” he said.
Since there aren’t a lot of hard industry numbers for website performance, BoostSuite conducted the study to attach figures to industry marketing hypotheses. BoostSuite’s analysis doesn’t cover the universe of small business websites. Because business website data are proprietary, the company could study only data it had access to — the websites of the 6,000 businesses that are BoostSuite users. The company looked at data cumulatively and individual businesses were not identified. Data was collected from the first six months of 2013.
The study results reveals and ranks the practices that are most important for improving a website’s performance. It might suggest that fixing a description on a page is more important than adjusting an image. But it might not. While Houghton acknowledges that it’s good to finally get hard data on marketing practices, BoostSuite won’t be disclosing all of its data. The information will be used to improve the software and become part of company marketing efforts.
BoostSuite’s services are free to businesses whose websites have 25 pages or less and fewer than 50 visitors a month. More traffic than that and a $19 monthly fee kicks in. The fee scales as traffic grows. While most BoostSuite users are in the United States, 36 percent of the company’s business comes from outside the country.
Houghton co-founded BoostSuite last August, his next venture after leaving as chairman of e-mail marketing company iContact, which was acquired by Vocus for $169 million last year. BoostSuite, which which is self-funded, has four full-time and two part-time employees. Houghton said that the company has no immediate plans to raise money. Right now, BoostSuite is working on filling out its suite of product offerings. But Houghton said that depending on the company’s progress, BoostSuite could be looking to raise capital in the next six to 12 months.
