Do you get a lot of phone calls from people that were just on your website? No? Is your inbox full of leads that have been generated by your website? No? Do you ever check your web logs or your google analytics account only to find that people aren’t actually visiting your website?

If this sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. I speak to hundreds of business owners on a monthly basis and the most common complaint they have about their website is that they don’t feel it’s helping them generate more revenue or leads. I probably hear this sentence at least 3 times a day, “My website really doesn’t help my business.”

If your website was your employee, you would fire it. The good news is that it’s probably a lot easier to turn around a bad website than it is to turn around a bad employee.

Let’s talk about some of the reasons why your website is not bringing you ideas and I’ll give you some ideas that will kick start your website and turn it into a contributing member of your business.

You don’t have a goal: It’s amazing to me how many managers and business owners have no real answer for me when I ask them “What is the goal of your website?”

I had a Vice President of a large cement mixing company tell me that SEO doesn’t work for his business because he spent large amounts of money on a campaign with all the “bells and whistles” and it never amounted to any new business. My question to him was pretty simple, “What was the goal of the campaign?” After a long pause, he changed the subject and started telling me again that SEO doesn’t work. When I pressed further about the goal, he simply changed the subject. So in other words, his SEO firm never had a goal for the campaign.

If you remember one thing from this post, remember this; your website will not and can not contribute to your business exploits without you or your website designer/seo practitioner having a clear understanding of what the ultimate goal of the website is. All good websites contribute to the company’s bottom line. Get your website involved people.

It’s nice to say that you want to sell more widgets or collect more leads but how exactly are you going to do that? Do you or your SEO professional have a vision of what has to happen so you can reach your goal? The goal holds everyone accountable; if we don’t reach the goal, how do we fix it? What’s the next step?

Let me give you an example. I was speaking to an insurance agent the other day that sells personal lines of insurance. The goal of his website was to have prospective customers fill in an online quote form. His SEO firm implemented the online quote system that was supposed to get him boat loads of new auto insurance quotes. The only problem was that the online form asked for no less than 16 pieces of information. At that point in the purchase process, it takes too much time and it requires that the person give too much personal information. Considering the prospects didn’t know him, this approach was a stretch. So I wasn’t surprised when the business owner told me that he’s only had 3 people fill in the form over the past 2 years.

The strategy hasn’t worked for two years but the online quote form is still on the business owner’s website. Why? The goal of getting boat loads of new auto insurance quotes has not happened. If it’s not working, if your website is not meeting your business goals, changes need to be made. With a properly articulated goal, any SEO firm worth their salt should have made changes to that campaign years ago.

With failure comes opportunity. The internet allows us to fail faster and cheaper than any other advertising medium. What I mean is, if you set a goal and your website is not achieving that goal, the internet allows you to see quickly that it’s not working and try something else to reach your goals. With traditional forms of advertising, radio, print or television advertising, you often don’t know how many people are actually seeing your ads and you can’t change your strategy mid-campaign, but with the internet everything is trackable. So set your goals and follow your analytics so you can tell right away what’s working and what needs to be changed. Use those failures as an inspiration and refocus your efforts on achieving your goals and don’t stop until you get to where you want to be.

Too many businesses settle on just being online and are confusing being online with actually making an effort to grab more business in their local market.

We’re going to get into some more specifics in this series of posts that will dramatically improve your engagement of online customers. This is the first in a seven part series that will help you create or change an existing website that will help your business to generate more targeted leads and sales. My next post is going to talk about an essential that every good website must have; a call to action.

See you soon and feel free to comment below with any suggestions or experiences you have that relate to this post.