Recently I’ve had a couple of prospects ask if we could help them get more traffic to their web site.

“I’m sure we could. But can you tell me, how much traffic do you currently get and what are you trying to accomplish with your web site?”

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Or another way to put it, how would you know your web site is effective?”

More silence, followed by, we want more sales…contact us…web 2.0 buzzwords…jibberish.

I wrote in an earlier post that more traffic isn’t necessarily the problem. Conversion usually is the problem, and the conversion problem usually comes because no goal or objective is set for the web site.

Here’s how it usually works:

Company puts up a web site, pukes all over themselves (they just talk about themselves and how great they are) and they stick a contact us link at the end of their navigation. When users don’t submit the contact form enough, they call wanting more traffic. It must be the traffic!

Now, if we sat down and said, “Let’s figure out what value we could provide, a specific action we want the user to take and how many times we want them to take that per month,” then we would be on to something! We would KNOW if the site was accomplishing its goal, and if not, we could do something about it-like get more traffic, change the call-to-action or change whatever the offering may be.

What is your web site’s objective? What is your monthly goal? How much traffic do you need per month? What should your conversion rate be? Is your web site successful?