Why do you have a website? Seems like a silly question doesn’t it! Well, why do you have a website. Some reasons will surprise you. Lot’s of sites are created by peer, business partner, relative or other pressures. You have a site because someone told you to have one. So, you get a site and everyone stops bothering you. Great, you now have a site. However, is it performing for you?
A website really has two primary functions and both of them relate to one thing, and one thing only. Leads! Yes, the life blood of every business on the planet. Without leads there are no sales, and no sales, no business. So if your website is not generating leads then why do you have a website?
Most business owners forget this basic rule, so for most you are not alone. Your business website should do two things; attract traffic and convert that traffic into some sort of action. That action might be calling you, visiting your store, ordering a product, signing up for a mailing list or obtaining information.
Obtaining traffic is typically done by creating an optimized site with great content related to specific keywords. Traffic is also generated by getting referrals from other websites and from using paid advertising (Pay Per Click options such as AdWords). Web traffic is no different than visitors to your physical facility. Without them (visitors) you have nothing!
Generating traffic as you might already guess is only half the battle. Just as in a store where you need educated sales people to guide your visitors to a successful sale so do you on a website. Is it easy to find out what you want the visitor to do? Any sales person will tell you, you must ask for the order. While there are certainly customers who come right to your site and do what you want the majority don’t (just like in a store).
You must know exactly what to happen when a visitor (the traffic you generated) arrives at your website. It’s not uncommon to find websites where you can’t find contact information, phone numbers, email addresses and so forth. All that effort to get a visitor there and they don’t know what to do or even if they did they can’t find out how to do it.
So, the question of “Why Do You Have a Website” is not all that dumb. If you know WHY you have the website you can optimize it to generate traffic and you can create the calls to action and the means for that call to action to succeed. If you don’t do those two things then there really is no need for you to even have a website.
