If where your website sits in Google takes up too much of your attention, or you are obsessed with how many ‘hits’ you get, could I politely suggest that you need to start looking past your nose?

I’m not sure who originally coined the phrase “Revenue is vanity and profit is sanity” but I think the most telling statement included the retort I heard Duncan Bannatyne add once:

Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity… but cash flow is reality.

The flow of traffic to business to sales

If you are running a business, I would hope that the cash flow comment makes perfect sense, if it doesn’t…. good luck!

From my experience, I know that many employees don’t understand it such a boring concept with a tendency to gauge business success purely on how busy they are on any given day. But, they’re just one cog in the process, as are we all.

It’s the same with your website. It’s like an employee. It has the potential to be an exceptionally important member of staff, but of itself, it’s just a cog. You’ve got to have a good product or service to start with and a decent level of customer service and in between are lots of these cogs, including people, that make the machine work… from enquiry to sale to delivery to invoice to getting paid.

Teaching your website new tricks

So, if your website is a member of staff and you are expecting it to:

  • be attractive to new business
  • sell and convert traffic
  • do the odd bit of PR for your business

how much training and investment are you giving it to perform these tasks?

Techniques change, user behaviour changes and guess what… no two visitors are the same. There’s no such thing as a prescriptive website. It’s about learning as much as you go along so you can can reinvest, making your website more and more effective – not just in a search engine ranking page (SERP) but for the thing that matters the most… the person on their computer or mobile device browsing your sales offering. The person that may want what you have on offer.

If you cannot convert your visitors into enquiries, what is the point?

Recently, as part of a web consultancy project, I helped increase conversion rates (web form enquiries) by 69% in two months. The traffic is up slightly by 8% but that’s by-the-by… it don’t pay the bills. It’s about how many of those visitors pick up the phone or fill out the form?

Obviously, that’s where my influence stops. By then, it’s down to the company to follow through on the online experience that led them to the front door. After all, I am just a cog too.

Getting to the point

Any business website has the potential to deliver not only your brand experience, but real life sales enquiries. But, all the while you are building the website YOU want, you may not get it.

Why not find a good outfit who can help you? One that fits your budget, one that has a good track record, and one who will take payment on performance? One that can show your dog of a website some new tricks?

If you find the right people, that cash flowing out should be flowing back in many times over.