For most businesses, search engine rank (i.e., the position in search engine results where your website’s link is found) is the single determining factor in how successful a website is. But simply because a website shows up in search engine results doesn’t mean it’s successful.
Success comes back to accomplishing business goals. If your self storage website isn’t bringing you more tenants or driving online storage unit reservations, it’s not succeeding. In order to improve your website so you can achieve your goals, you need to monitor your website analytics, specifically metrics like organic traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates, which tie back to how many potential customers visit your site and take action.
Organic Traffic
Social networks and referral traffic generated from other websites are among some of the ways website visitors can find your website. But the most important source of web traffic comes from organic search results.
Organic results start just after the paid search results (which are marked with a small yellow “Ad” marker). They’re what Google and other search engines determine as the most relevant websites based on the search term. If you’re performing well in organic search results (i.e., on the first page), you should be seeing good organic web traffic numbers in your analytics.
Why does this matter for your website’s success? Well, the more you appear in search results for self storage-related terms, such as “storage unit in [your city],” the more likely you are to attract people who need storage. This means you’re effectively targeting people who can move down the conversion funnel once they land on your site.
Bounce Rate
Once potential customers have found your website, you need to keep them there. The best way to gauge how your site retains visitors is to watch bounce rate. This is the percentage of visitors who enter on a single page and exit from that same page.
A good bounce rate (between 40% and 65%) is an indicator of success only if it stays low and relatively consistent. This shows that visitors are interested in visiting other pages of your site, which means they’re more likely to enter the conversion funnel.
A bad bounce rate (between 70% and 90%) can indicate a problem with your website, though. It could be a page that loads too slowly or a link that leads to a broken page. It could even be that the site visitor can’t find the contact or conversion page they need. Any of these situations can prevent potential customers from staying on your site.
Now, there is an exception with bounce rates. The only time a “bad” bounce rate isn’t actually bad is when a potential customer lands directly on a conversion page, such as a storage unit reservation page. In this scenario, it’s not important for the visitor to visit other pages, as they’re already on the page you need them to find in order to accomplish your business goals. Keep this in mind as you track bounce rates for each page.
Conversion Rates
If your self storage website has an option for potential customers to reserve a storage unit through your website, ask questions about how you can keep improving the conversion rates you see.
- Is the online reservation easy to use?
- How many steps does it take to reserve a storage unit?
- Is the call-to-action driving conversions through urgent language (e.g., Reserve Your Unit Now)?
These questions not only help to make the process simple for users, but it can also help you better understand how to improve your conversion rate if it’s low.
For today’s websites, converting over 5% of all visits into some type of sale is considered average. If you’re falling below that, your website isn’t as successful as it could be. Start looking for areas where you can condense a few steps of the conversion process. If customers have to fill out too much information or click through too many pages before making their storage unit reservation, they may decide to leave your site.
Your website is a continuous project that’s never finished, and that’s a good thing. Doing what you can to stay ahead of the curve will only make finding potential issues with your organic traffic, bounce rates, and conversion rates simpler to fix in the long run.
