Jasmine Birtles
Your money-making expert. Financial journalist, TV and radio personality.
Strategies to Make Your Website Profitable in 2024
Reading Time: 6 minutesFor a lot of businesses, your online presence is crucial to your performance. This effort usually starts and ends with your website. In other words, the state of your website could determine your overall profitability but is there anything you can do to exploit this knowledge? Well, here are a few strategies that are likely to make your website more profitable.
- Use cookies
- Optimize for mobile
- Enhance your SEO
- Work on the technical aspect of your site
- Implement A/B testing
Revise your site’s performance and make improvements based on this audit
1. Use cookies
The best way to convince people to spend money on your website or revisit it (so that it’s more appealing to advertisers) is to give them exactly what they want. For this, you must first figure out what they want, and the best way to do so is to use cookies. This way, you’ll gather customer data to analyze for insights.
You’ll see exactly what they think about your website, as well as ideas on how you can improve it.
There’s an intentionality behind the choice of the word “improve.”
However, many companies underuse cookies or use them in the wrong way. In their minds, this problem is solved, so when they look for solutions, they look for them elsewhere.
With the use of a better cookie solution, like Google third-party cookies, you have a chance to get more info on every visit and never miss a valuable resource.
The most important insight you can get is the ability to segment your audience based on preferences and user behavior.
It’s necessary to have a comprehensive cookie policy that complies with all the privacy regulations in question. This is supposed to be an invaluable asset, not something that will get you into all kinds of legal trouble. So, make sure that you study the subject matter meticulously.
2. Optimize for mobile
Next, you want to optimize your site for mobile.Chances are you’re probably already doing some sort of mobile optimization, however a major hazard is believing that your site is optimized for mobile when it really isn’t. You’ll make an assumption that this issue is solved (crossed from your to-do list) and look for something else to focus on.
One of the biggest problems with the majority of sites that are poorly optimized for mobile is that while optimizing, they just picked one small screen size and forgot about everything else. A screen size difference between a tablet and a phone is quite significant.
Second, you need to focus extra hard on loading time. People don’t want to buy from a non-responsive site. This is partially due to them being impatient (they can just backtrack and go someplace else), but it can also be due to them assuming that you’re not a serious organization.
For an online business, there’s not much that a customer really sees. It’s not like they can come to the physical store and examine packages. What they see is that your site takes forever to load, and they assume that you’re just as inefficient everywhere.
Poor mobile optimization will also reflect (negatively) on your search engine ranking.
As your ranking goes down, so does your discoverability, and a lower traffic always results in a lower revenue. Not only that, but it also makes you less interesting to sponsors, advertisers, and other parties that could contribute to the profitability of your site.
You have to remember that, in 2024, a huge portion of your audience (perhaps even the majority, depending on the nature of your site) are mobile users.
3. Enhance your SEO
Previously, we talked about your Google ranking and how it’s affected by your mobile-friendliness; however, you can also make a decision to work on your SEO directly.
Like before, you need to start by auditing your SEO and seeing what you’re doing wrong or what you’re not doing good enough. The best advice you can receive here is that while doing DIY SEO is better than doing no SEO whatsoever, it’s always better to leave these things to professionals.
The thing about SEO is that it makes it easy to discover. This makes people trust you more, seeing as how even people who don’t know the first thing about SEO automatically assume that if you’re ranked better, you’re better than competitors.
Moreover, the inbound nature of SEO ensures that you’re the one that’s being discovered. Your audience naturally assumes that they’re the ones who found you (and they have no idea by all the work done by your SEO team behind the curtains to ensure this chance encounter). This means that their defense mechanisms (and their refusal to engage) will be a lot lower than with direct marketing (like cold calls and emails).
The next thing you need to understand about profitability is that it’s directly affected by your website’s traffic. Just think about it – even with the same conversion rate, the difference in traffic makes the difference in profit. Selling a product to 3% of 1,000 people means selling it to 30 people. Selling to 3% of 10,000 people means selling to 300 people. It’s a ten-fold difference.
Ultimately, you can even see good SEO as a form of social proof. You’ve passed all the tests Google has set, and you’ve earned your spot.
4. Work on the technical aspect of your site
If your site is fast, it will make a great first impression on your audience, and they might just stick around and buy. If the layout is good, they’ll have an easy time navigating it and finding what they’re looking for before they get bored and quit. If it has a great architecture, crawlers will be able to index it a lot sooner, and your digital marketing will benefit.
All of these factors have one thing in common: They’re technical aspects of your site that often get neglected.
By improving the way your site works, your visitors will have a better experience, which will inevitably result in a better outcome. You’ll earn more, grow faster, and have a scalable future for your site.
Sure, there are other factors affecting your revenue, like the features of your products, the offer in your online store, your upselling and cross-selling capabilities, and your prices. However, in this post, we’re discussing how your site can be optimized to become more profitable, which is a different story altogether.
Even simple tweaks can make a massive difference further down the line. Moreover, it’s non-negotiable, and the sooner you do it, the better.
5. Implement A/B testing
No matter what kind of change you introduce, it’s essential that you test it out and see if it’s better than before. Not all changes are positive, and there’s no shame in reverting to a previous state when you see that what you’re doing now is counterproductive. There’s a lot of harm in being too stubborn to admit a mistake and allowing these negative decisions to affect your entire brand.
It’s even better to start out by testing two different states before implementing a change. You can do this through A/B testing. The simplest explanation of this concept would be to say that you’re actually comparing two separate versions of a webpage or an element in order to see which performs better.
Without testing, all you’re really doing is relying on guesswork. Even if you have the data to support the decision, you have no idea how this change will affect everything else. The only way to know for sure is to try out different things and see what seems to be the best in practice.
Now, one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of enterprises and webmasters make is underestimating the importance of consistency. Sure, they resort to A/B testing for major changes, but there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t test absolutely everything.
When trying to improve your profitability, the metrics that you’re aiming for are things like user behavior, CTA (call-to-action) buttons, images, layouts, etc. You can use a tool as simple as Google Optimize to create and run these tests.
Revise your site’s performance and make improvements based on this audit
As you can see, the biggest threat is not in the things that you’re not doing; it’s in strategies that you’re not applying well enough. If your site is not optimized for mobile and you’re aware of the fact, what you’re doing is a choice. However, it’s a choice that you can change and a problem that you can fix.
On the other hand, if you believe that you’re doing these things right, you’ll keep doing them wrong. It doesn’t even have to be outright wrong, just… well, not good enough. There’s a lot of missed potential that you first have to discover in order to take advantage of. Now, you at least have some idea of how.
Disclaimer: MoneyMagpie is not a licensed financial advisor and therefore information found here including opinions, commentary, suggestions or strategies are for informational, entertainment or educational purposes only. This should not be considered as financial advice. Anyone thinking of investing should conduct their own due diligence.
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