As business owners, we all know we need to keep marketing during these tough times. The key is to focus our marketing efforts to yield more results without increasing total dollars spent. One of these marketing efforts should be your website. In my experience developing websites for over 13 years, most businesses do not use the internet to its fullest potential.

It’s easy to decide to invest on your website. It’s more difficult to determine exactly what to do and how much to spend.

First, you need to answer the question: do you have a traffic or a conversion issue to solve?

A traffic issue means that your website has been developed well but not too many people visit it. In this case, you are better off investing in marketing strategies to increase traffic to the site instead of re-designing or tweaking the site at all. How do you know if you have a good site? Read “How to evaluate your website?” in this blog or submit your URL to MB/I for a complimentary review.

What can you do to increase traffic? Here are some ideas:

• Increase the number of backlinks to your site
• Invest on search engine optimization
• Find high-ranking blogs in your industry and post comments
• Send an email to your current network with an incentive to tell a friend
• Add your website to all of your social media profiles: LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

A conversion issue on the other hand means that you have good traffic but visitors don’t complete a transaction. The transaction can be to call you, email you, sign up for your newsletters, buy a product, etc. In this case, the investment needs to be on your site itself. Some possible reasons why you have low conversion are:

• Unclear or missing calls to action. Some sites assume that visitors will know to click on the contact us link. The reality is that each page on your website should have a very clear call to action preferably above the fold and on the left side of the page.
• Lack of trust. If your site does not look professional, current, and credible, it will be hard to convince visitors to move to the next step. Trust is earned with good content, good design, and good programming.
• Too much commitment. If you want visitors to purchase right after landing on your site without giving them enough information, you might lose them to the competition. Visitors need demos, trial versions, specifications, etc. before making a final decision.

You will need the help of a professional web developer to determine whether low conversion is due to design, content, or programming issues.

Finally, how much to spend? At MB/I, we help answer this question by doing a break even analysis for our clients. The decision to invest on a website needs to go through the same decision process as any other business investment. The dollar amount of the investment might vary depending on your own specific numbers. Work together with your web developer to determine several break even scenarios and to agree on a suitable course of action.