You have optimised your website and attracted a large number of inbound links by one means or another. The results of this are that your site now appears on the first page of the top three search engines, Google, MSN and Yahoo, for your chosen keywords or phrases. You have cracked it! Now you are getting hundreds of visitors a day to your website. Unfortunately very few are staying to browse your site and even fewer are purchasing your products or enquiring after the services you offer.



You must look closely at your site to find the reason behind this if you wish to improve your conversion rates. There are two immediate actions you can take. Have you optimised your site for the search engines or your visitors? You should always optimise your site for your visitors as they will provide you with your income not the search engines. The search engines are simply a means to an ends.

It is better to have twenty visitors to your site 15 of whom purchase a product or service than it is to have 500 of whom only 5 make a purchase. When developing your site keep in mind your potential customers and put text into the site that they will appreciate, like and find informative. Never write your copy with the search engines in mind and those omnipotent algorithms. Algorithms do not make enquiries or purchases people do.

If your copy is attractive and readable and encourages real people to contact you or buy a product then it is highly likely to be equally attractive to the search engines. When writing your copy you should not be trying to ‘sell' your product or service with blatant over the top advertising. Be more subtle. You are fulfilling a wish or a need or solving a problem so be informative. People have carried out a specific search so the need is already there you have to now give them the information they need to convince them to purchase of you. So as always the content is the key to making sales as well as attracting the attention of the search engines.

You must work hard at getting this content right. The second line of investigation is to analyse your sites visitor statistics carefully Look at each visitor and how they arrived at your site. That is what search terms did they use? What page did they land on? What pages did they navigate through? What page did they exit on? What area of the World or country did they come from? If they made no enquiry or purchase, look at their search phrase, and where on your site they went, and attempt to calculate why they left without making that enquiry or purchase. Was it because their search was not appropriate for ypour actual product or service? Do you not perhaps provide your service to their particular area? Did they miss or could not find exactly what they wanted on your site because of badly designed navigation paths? Or is it perhaps because the text is simply not up to standard?

If you think it is a structural problem then you can alter this so that people find it easier to navigate to places on the site that they actually want. It may also be a matter of your content so you can change this.

By constantly monitoring your site's statistics you can dramatically increase your conversion rates, that is, convert more of your visitors into paying customers. Finally do keep note of what you do so that you can accurately monitor the changes you make to find out if and by how much they are making a difference.