I’m often asked, by people who have websites, if I can do anything to improve their search engine rankings because the site isn’t bringing them any business. It’s fairly typical for them to say that they’ve never even had an enquiry from the site.

More often than not, when I look at the site, the problem is obvious. The site is so badly designed that anyone who arrives at it, whether it’s from a search engine or anywhere else, is just going to click straight away to somewhere else.

Generating business from a website involves two things. Persuading people to come to it, from search engines for example, and then enticing them to stay on the site and take action – contact you or buy a product depending on what the site was intended to do.

Those of us in the internet marketing business use a term called conversion ratio. That it the ratio of people who arrive at the site to the number of people who take action. If the conversion ratio of your site is zero, then before spending money on search engine optimization to bring more visitors, you need to do something about the site design.

Remember, if your conversion ratio is zero and you double the number of visitors coming to the site, the conversion ratio will still be zero because 2×0=0.

Mike Brogan