There are many sites that get traffic but don’t convert the visitors into sales. Often, the Customer isn’t getting the traffic he deserves, and is also having problems getting full value from the existing traffic in terms of conversions. So, our penultimate tip is:

9. Do something with the traffic

There are some natural beneficial consequences of having a search engine optimisation partner - that partner won’t want to see all the new traffic go to waste.

Critical in this is the conversion process. In other words, once the new visitor arrives at the page, does he buy something? If not, why not?

After all, it’s pointless going to all the time and trouble of boosting your traffic if you lose sales on the first page.

All of this is a little more subjective in terms of design and marketing strategy. Of course it's very easy to monitor what difference the changes you’ve decided on have made. But typical mistakes you see all the time are:

Purchasable product not on the first page
Too many clicks to get to the products
No obvious ‘calls-to-action’
Clunky product searching facility
No obvious point of contact – has to look for the phone number
Anonymous website with no local or regional personality
Poor or non-intuitive navigation
Too much text

All of this can be fixed relatively easily. Companies invest a lot of money in their websites, and it can come as quite a shock that, using modern day content management tools, the whole site can be re-created at a fraction of the cost. Although remember that, depending on your requirements, your search engine optimisation partner may recommend using microsites rather than re-creating your main site.

It's ironic, but the most profitable websites in the world are some of the ugliest. No offence guys, but amazon, dell, ebay, yahoo and lastminute are not exactly design masterpieces, but they do close business and they do that very well indeed.

Which goes to show that, historically, we have built sites in the way that we design printed marketing materials. These days it’s obvious that we need to design sites in the same way that we would set up a new sales team. The office and the surroundings are not as important as the proposition or the process to find, win and keep new customers. Search engine optimisation specialists can guide you through the logical solutions to the problem of driving customers to your site, and helping you to convert them when they get there.