Sazbean

One of the top requests we get from clients is to help increase traffic to their business website.  Our first response is to ask what business goal they are trying to attain.  While increasing traffic may be one of many possible solutions, it may not be the right one.  Working on increasing traffic on your website without understanding how it will help you reach your goals is like getting triple-bypass heart surgery before you’ve had a doctor’s diagnosis.

Let’s take a look at an example:

An e-commerce site is spending a great deal of money on Internet advertising and SEO, but is sales have fallen.  Their first reaction is to increase traffic to their website.  What should they do?

Understand your business goals

Is the business goal to increase traffic?  Hardly.  Their business goal is to increase sales.  Increasing traffic may help, but there may also be other issues.  By understanding their business goals, they’ll be able to come up with solutions and ways to measure whether they’ve attained their goals.

Understand the problem

Understanding the problem helps you brainstorm all the possible solutions.  The highest return on investment may come from a mixture of solutions or one solution may not be complete without taking a look at other aspects of the website and business.  After taking a look at their website, their advertising and marketing efforts, this client had a number of different issues to address, including conversion rates, usability, marketing message, and ROI of advertising, which were all affecting their sales and bottom line.

Look for solutions

Now that you have recognized your business goals and understand the full set of issues, you can come up with the right solutions.  In our example, there are a wide range of solutions, of which, increasing traffic was only a very small part.  By creating an Internet business strategy from the set of solutions, the client was able to more efficiently attack the problem.

Measure your progress

This is where the numbers do actually help.  Of course you need to understand exactly what numbers you are looking for.  Just increasing the number of visitors or page views won’t help attain your business goals.  For our example, we had to measure conversion rates, ROI of advertising, time on site, exit pages, etc. to see how we were progressing.  It may seem like a confusing bunch of numbers, but once you’ve gone through this thought process, the numbers you need are much more clear.

Summary

Before you spend big bucks on SEO or Internet advertising, take a few minutes to consider what business goals you are trying to achieve and all the possible issues that you may need to consider to reach those goals.  Just a few minutes of thought can help direct your efforts into the biggest bang for your buck.

(photo by randy son of robert @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting