What Are You Selling?

Often companies begin their online presence by purchasing a domain name and publishing a few pages, which actually turns out to be little more than a brochure. Then, they discover through their friends and colleagues about search engine optimization in order to attract an audience. It is rare for them to take the time to research what their competitors are doing online and discovering what works and doesn't work. Even less will investigate how they might change their business strategy to take advantage of what the internet offers.

Who Are Your Visitors

Getting a site online raises some important questions, which if not answered tends to make the search for high volume visitors a rather useless quest. There is no reason spending time and money trying to attract customers who are not interested in what you are selling. A majority of my new clients just don't take the time to answer some fundamental questions, the most important being if you intend to sell a product or a service. Here are a few more questions that should be considered before putting your business online:

• What type of visitors do you intend to attract?
• Do your visitors look for cheap or high-end products?
• What general age group will your site attract?
• Is your product or service local or global?

Establishing Goals

A good place to start answering fundamental questions is to establish some goals for your site visitors such as:

• signup for a newsletter
• subscribe to a mailing list
• download an ebook or a brochure
• purchase a product
• purchase a service
• signup for service

Tracking Progress

It would be difficult to determine if your efforts are even worth the time and money you spend without having some means of determining if your site is a success as measured by the goals that you've established. Usually this would mean that a site visitor completed some action.

Most visitors can be categorized as prospects, leads, and sales. A prospect is someone who has expressed an interest in your product or service and becomes a lead once they are ready to buy. A sale, then, is a visitor who choses to buy what you offer. Therefore, the goals as outlined above need to be tracked as visitor's progress through well defined "funnels" or as customer journeys through your site.