By Andrew Plimmer, Suncoast Internet

Investing in a new website for your business can cost thousands when you consider the amount of hours that are involved in planning, design, programming and content writing. So it stands to reason you will want to see a return on your investment.

Potentially of course, a fantastic new website can generate business 24/7 every day of the year from all over the world. In terms of marketing and client servicing, a well designed and properly maintained website can be one of the best business investments you will make.

All too often however, we see the results of clients being frustrated because their fabulous new website isn’t getting many visitors and, consequently, is not generating enough business. This effectively renders their website – not to mention all our hard work - almost worthless. What’s the point in having the best website in the world if nobody knows it’s there? Don’t forget there are over 3 billion websites (and growing) on the internet and competition is growing. Competitors in your business sector want your customers and they will get them if internet users can find their website more easily. A website owner already frustrated by a lack of traffic cannot afford to sit back and do nothing.

So what can you do? You could try altering your website to make it more eye catching by using different colours and jazzy images. But this still doesn’t tell people about the existence of your website.

This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help out. The purpose of SEO is to get a website high up on the search engine results when internet users type in certain keyword phrases. How it works is not rocket science, but doing it is certainly time consuming. Website analysis and comprehensive keyword research are the first important steps.

Your website may rank highly on Google for a particular keyword or phrase but is that the only keyword phrase that people will use to find your products or services? What about all the other keywords that are important to your website? Does the website rank highly for those too?

A typical SEO client can see as much as a 50% increase in the number of enquiries as a direct result of having their website on the first page of Google for a popularly used keyword phrase. But what if that doesn’t happen to your business, even though the website is consistently found on the first page of Google?

SEO is just one element of a bigger Internet Marketing picture which seeks to give you a return on your website investment by taking a more holistic view of how to attract visitors and turn them into customers. If your website looks great, ranks highly in the search engines but isn’t generating the business you thought it would, it’s time to review its content. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: Is it obvious to the customer how they can buy or send an enquiry, i.e. is the navigation clear? Is the copy descriptive enough for the customer to be able to visualise themselves with the product or service?  What, if anything, is persuading the customer to buy? Does the content ‘speak’ to the different types of customers that you expect your website to receive? Do you even know what kind of people will be buying your products and services?

Ultimately, if you do your analysis and research, you’ll improve the quality of your website which should in turn improve your website traffic and conversion rates, bringing in the business.