First impressions are everything. Now that’s a lesson we’ve all learnt growing up and through our professional careers. Yet, businesses spend hundreds and even thousands of dollars, to score a higher rank on popular search engines without first investing enough in their own virtual presence. Everyone knows that if you don’t show up on the first page, perhaps even the top half of the search engine results page, you have very little chance of being noticed. But if your website looks and functions like it was created in 1998, that may be a good thing and a blessing in disguise.

Google’s top half of the first page is prime real estate and the holy grail of marketing. 80% of the click-throughs are generated from this virtual space. 90% of the traffic is generated by the organic results and about 5% of the users click through to the 2nd page of the search results. The top 3-5 links on the search results page are the holy grail of marketing. The have spawned an entire ecosystem of several thousand companies who promise to deliver your website in this virtual space. It’s the most expensive real estate out there!

SEO is good but having your site show up in the Top 5 search results page poses an inherent challenge in itself, that is, if your site isn’t optimized from a design, usability and content perspective. Beyond the first page, quite honestly, no one cares. So it may not matter if your site isn’t optimized. This is a different kind of challenge requiring a different approach that we’ll discuss another time.

For now, let’s focus on 3 critical areas of optimizing your virtual world before you spend more $$ inviting everyone to step into it.

Design
Make a SPLASH! This is the very first impression of your site. If the website isn’t professional looking, you could be selling diamonds for peanuts and you’d be left wondering why people aren’t buying. You don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on making your site pretty [it sure helps if you do have that kind of money!] but that doesn’t mean you put lipstick on a pig either. There are several budget-friendly options available.

1. Purchase a Template: There are a couple of websites dedicated to this e.g. www.4templates.com, www.dreamtemplates.com etc. where you can purchase professional looking templates for less than $50. However, if your competition or another company decides to build their site using the same template you choose, good luck differentiating! Both sites, however, do offer the option to purchase the template outright, for about $2k – $3k.

2. In-house development: The problem with this approach is that things never seem to get done. There’s always something or the other that’s more important than your website that seems to take precedence. You may resist this truth, but I’ve seen it happen many times.

3. Crowd-sourcing: This option gets you the best of both worlds. You float your design proposal, companies bid on the project, you select the best option and run with it. It most often costs a few hundred dollars so it won’t hurt your pocket as much. An example of this is www.crowdspring.com. From logos to website design, they do it all.

Usability
Now that the prospect, based on an early assessment of your design, has decided to spend some more time on your site, it is time to capture this early interaction and turn it into a call-to-action, whether you sell typewriters or clean nuclear waste for a living.

If you offer services, make it easy for them to call you using a toll-free number, connect via Facebook, follow you on Twitter, email you, fill out a form, etc. If you sell products, make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for using search, filters, categories, most popular, gift ideas etc.

Offer them ease of navigation, clearly promote your product(s) or service(s) and make it easy for them to find information in a few clicks.

Content
Finally. Give them information. When it comes to making a purchase, users want to make informed decisions. If you’re selling a product, offer them product details, pictures, choices, configurations, ratings, etc. and most importantly customer reviews. Research shows that most buying decisions are now strongly influenced based on feedback from other users.

If your business is about services, tell the prospective customer, WHAT is unique about your service, HOW your service benefits them and WHY they should utilize your services and not your competitor’s. Present a list of existing customers and testimonials if your agreements allow you to do so. This again is a strong influencer in the decision-making process.

If you believe your website has way too much information that will overwhelm the user, try custom landing pages i.e. a customized set of pages designed and tailored to deliver bite-sized information on a specific product and/or service. It’s like browsing the end-caps in a grocery store i.e. users stay focused on the product without getting inundated with all the choices that the aisle has to offer. For more information, read one of my earlier blog posts.

In Summary
Before you spend all your budget and resources on SEO/SEM efforts, take some of that and put that towards optimizing your website first. Trust me, there’s a better ROI to be realized if you view SEO/SEM as complementary to what your website has to offer. Focus on Design, Usability and Content. You’re likely to generate higher conversions and a greater ROI with both efforts working in parallel. And, please, don’t get caught with your pants down!!