A lot of people aren't happy with their website, whether they designed it themselves or got in a professional to do it for them. Traffic is slow; sales are not being made; you're not receiving much in the way of positive customer feedback. Often this is simply because of a lack of thought about what the website is actually for. You must have a website; everyone says so. But why do you have a website? Is it simply to provide contact details for your potential customers, or are you providing information about your products and services as well? Does your site have ecommerce functionality? Are you trying to recruit staff or gain product feedback through your website? Is branding an important function of your site?

You need to think carefully about what your site is for, and try to optimise it for those functions. If your site is little more than an online business card, you needn't worry too much about traffic, but you're also not getting the most out of the website medium. If you're using it for anything else – marketing, recruitment, sales – then you need to increase targeted traffic to your site, and you need to make sure that your site spurs your visitors to action.

Increasing Targeted Traffic

Try to draw visitors to your site. A site with no visitors is useless. What is more, a site that only attracts visitors who aren't really interested in your products or services is pretty useless too. You need *targeted traffic*. Those elusive targeted customers will be attracted by the following:

- Useful, relevant and innovative advice. Try publishing articles and news items on your site which are full of keywords that are related to your business. Search engines like pages with lots of relevant text, so it will be easier for customers to find your site, and if you update this section regularly with valuable content, you are likely to attract returning visitors.

- Freebies. There are dozens of free services on the web that you can add to your site, or else you can offer your own free e-book or piece of software.

- Your web address appearing on all your stationery, and consider mailshots and other offline marketing schemes to draw people to your site.

- Links to your site on third party sites. You could swap links with complementary businesses (so if you're a florist, a wedding caterer might be happy to swap links with you), and also consider joining forums and newsgroups to share links to your site. Customers will click through to your page from elsewhere, and search engines will also note that your site is "important" because other sites link to it.

- Pay-per-click ads. Google's AdWords programme is one scheme you could join. Pay-per-click can be expensive, but it's well-targeted and can draw a lot of customers.

- Online advertising. You can often pay to put a banner or link on other people's sites.

Just getting online is not good enough; you need to promote your site too. Once you've got some visitors, how are you going to convince them to buy?

Turning Visitors into Customers

Your site should be more than just a contact card. At the very least, you should take the opportunity a website offers to promote your products and services, giving your visitors access to pricing information and other details. This means your site should present a professional image and be easy to navigate.

Better still, if possible, give your customers the option of actually buying your products online. Ecommerce is a rapidly expanding market, and the convenience and speed of ordering products online is much more attractive than having to telephone a number or make the effort to go out and find a bricks-and-mortar shop.

By Natalie Catchpole

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