Though our business focus is Search Marketing, at the end of the day our job is to help our clients grow their businesses online. It’s not enough just to help drive traffic to a website through natural search, the traffic to your site needs to convert.

For some companies, conversion is a sale of a product or service, for some it’s getting the visitor to call and schedule an appointment. Regardless of what you want people to do on your website, it’s important that you create a website that asks people to do what you want them to do. If you want to improve the performance of your website, do try these 3 strategies:

1) Be a visitor to your own site, try to sign up for a newsletter or order a product. Was it easy, what would you do to improve the process? Think about your website goals through the eyes of your visitors.

2) Look at your website analytics. Make this a regular part of running your online business. Look at your statistics, how many people visit your site monthly? What is your bounce rate (define)? What is your conversion rate (define)? What are people doing on your site? Where do people abandon the order process?

3) Choose one element of your site to test or improve. Once you’ve reviewed your analytics, choose one important page on your site and make a change that you discovered during your website analysis. For example, if visitors are abandoning after they get to the credit card page, make sure instructions are easy to understand. Do you have authorize.net or other respected credit card processing companies seal? Is there a link to your satisfaction guarantee or return policy?

Make a commitment to spend a couple of hours each month being a visitor to your own site. Create a process for champion/challenger improvement and testing of your landing pages. These simple changes can have great impact on your bottom line.