Business Tools

Five Key Elements of a Profitable Website

Brian Offenberger, owner of the Aftermarketer Club, recently provided the five elements every website needs to increase profits and achieve maximum results. According to Offenberger, the five elements presented in the SEMA Webinar, “Basics of Website Design and Content,” are not just suggestions; they are ways to gear your website so that it’s providing you with the results that you expect.

In addition to the five parts of a great website, participants also learned easy ways to turn visitors into customers, how to evaluate web effectiveness and the best ways to add website content.

The Five Elements of a Great Website

  1. It Must Be Found (Be Found Online): Your site must be found easily by the targeted customers. “You can be the best-looking person in the bar, but if no one else knows that you are there, you’re never going to have a date,” explained Offenberger. “That’s my way of telling you that you can have the greatest website in the world, but if your targeted customers cannot find it easily, and Google cannot read your website easily, you’re in trouble.”
  2. It Must Convert Visitors Into Buyers: Offenberger says that you can have all of the website traffic in the word, but if it’s not the right type of traffic and if it doesn’t buy, then it doesn’t create profit for you.
  3. It Must Capture the Visitor’s Name and E-mail Address: Another must-have aspect of your site is a function to capture names and e-mail addresses of your visitors.
  4. It Must Contain Analytics for Measurement: “A lot of us build a website, put it online, but never analyze it to find out how well its doing for us,” said Offenberger.
  5. You Must Test to Find Out What Works the Best: Adding to the argument for using analytics, many sites are built and put online, but companies fail to follow through with any sort of testing to determine what works the best.

Offenberger provides a wealth of information for each of the five elements. To hear them all, download the webinar.

Here is a brief overview of what Offenberger shared to help you set up your site so that potential customers can easily find your business online.

There are four detailed aspects of getting customers to your website.

  • Keyword Selection: You have to use the right keywords.
  • Website Built the Right Way: Google needs to be able to find, recognize and index your site.
  • On-page Optimization Considerations: There are things that you can do to your website that help it to be found online.
  • Get Inbound Links: You need to have inbound links from other websites into yours.

For Offenberger's in-depth explanations and simple tools for each of the topics covered, including how to convert visitors into buyers, obtaining visitor names and e-mail addresses, analytics for measurement and testing websites for effectiveness, download the entire presentation.

For more information on SEMA webinars, visit www.sema.org/webinars.