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Driving traffic to your site is great, as far as it goes – but it’s not enough.  You need proven ways to convert prospects into buyers.

When your site is primed for search engine optimization (SEO), you get tons of traffic coming to you for free.  Great, right?  But many small business owners make the mistake of just concentrating on traffic and search engine optimization. They get the traffic, but it doesn’t convert into buyers. What good is a ton of traffic coming to your site, if it doesn’t improve your sales?

You’ve ultimately got to look at your bottom line. If you’re spending tons of cash, hours of your time and all your energy on driving traffic to your site with SEO, but not making sure it converts into buying customers, you’re just chasing your tail.

Remember, you’re not after “clicks” – you’re after sales! Here are 3 basics that you MUST ensure happen on your site in order to convert visitors into customers and increase your sales:

Craft an Effective Message.
First, you need an effective sales message that grabs your surfer by the mouse, turns them upside down, and shakes their credit cards out of their pockets! Recent studies have demonstrated that you’ve got less than 8 seconds to capture the typical Internet surfer’s attention.

Address desires directly. Tell your story right up front – what does your company offer? What sets you apart from your competitors? Make sure this information is prominently displayed on your home page.

The key to converting your visitors is to find out what they want – and the easiest way to find that out is simply to ask them. E-mail existing customers and prospects and entice them with incentives, discounts, and giveaways to tell you about what they buy, why they buy, and what their important current needs are.  This will give you a gold mine of information you can use to craft sales messages that resonate with your audience.

Location, Location, Location.
Second, where your messages are placed on your site is critical. Make sure that all critical information appears “above the fold” so your customers don’t have to scroll down the page to figure out what your company does and whether you offer what they need.

Different computer monitor resolutions will display your site differently, so visit www.AnyBrowser.com  and perform a screen size test, to be certain that your site will look great regardless of the computer monitor your customer is viewing it on.

Overall Navigation Aesthetics.
Finally, the overall navigation of your site is critical to your conversion success.

• Is it easy for customers to find what they are looking for?
• Is a phone number provided in an obvious location?
• Do you explicitly list payment options and delivery policies?

By ensuring that your customers can easily find the information they need to do business with you, you’ll improve your conversion optimization and your sales.

Conversion optimization is a process – not an event.  Test alternate messaging, placement and navigation options to continually improve your site’s conversion optimization.  To help, our friends at Google have developed a free tool called the Google Website Optimizer (http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/) to test different headlines, messages and images for performance. Test one variable at a time so you can be sure to know which changes have the greatest impact on your conversion rate. And be sure to study your competition – especially competitors that are several steps ahead of you.

When it comes to having a profitable on-line business, a combination of search engine optimization and crafting effective marketing messages that convert into buyers is important. Search engine optimization combined with Conversion Optimization is the most powerful duo you have in your Internet Marketing bag of tricks in terms of finding new customers, increasing your sales and improving your website performance.