The Ideal Web Site – Part 4 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Attractive Enough

Effective Internet marketing follows the 80/20 rule; where 80% of your investment is ‘Super SEO’ (promoting the hell out of your website and brand online) and where only 20% is the website itself.

• A pretty website without top rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing/MSN is pretty much useless.

• An award-winning website without traffic just plain sucks. They cost more money and take more time to design, so without traffic (sales)  they become a bigger liability.

• A drop dead gorgeous website that does not convert visitors into qualified leads or customers has failed as an advertising and marketing medium. Period.

An attractive website is only worth a damn when it provides a positive return on your investment.

Are we against sexy design and design awards? Absolutely not! My own epiphany came about seven years ago when one of our clients received a beautiful award for the website we developed for them. My customer called me to congratulate me on the design achievement, but then lamented over the site’s poor performance on the bottom line. I reminded him that we had proposed an aggressive SEO and online marketing campaign but he had declined. On further reflection I realized it was my fault. I’m the internet marketing professional, I know what really matters when it comes to ROI and I hadn’t absolutely insisted on a program to drive traffic to their site. I had allowed the client to invest their entire online marketing budget on an award-winning design and there had been nothing left for assuring the site had traffic or the ability to convert traffic into customers.

A good website is ‘attractive enough’ that visitors feel they are dealing with a solid, reputable company. When search engine rankings and other sources of traffic are in place, and the site is generating enough sales to more than offset the cost of additional design, it may be time to revisit the design with a facelift. If your site isn’t in the top ten ranking positions for all of your primary keyword search terms, put your money into SEO, social networking and link building, not a flashy media presentation few people will ever see.

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