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Frequently small business owners spend hard earned cash for a web site and they get little return on the investment.

The first step in designing or redesigning your web site is to clarify the goals you want the web site to achieve. What is the purpose of your web site? What do you want your web site to do?

One of the goals of your web site should be to attract the attention of your target market. Most small business web sites fail to do this. Typically, these web sites are filled with information on the firm’s services, products and credentials.

These types of web sites do little to attract new customers, simply because they are “me” oriented. In other words, they don’t offer what the customer is looking for.

Most users of the Web are searching for information and solutions to problems. If your web site doesn’t provide easily found solutions the customer will quickly leave for other options.

Is your target market searching for the content you have on your web site?

Many small businesses have web sites in order to establish credibility. The mere presence of a web site is not going to convince prospects you can help them. To establish trust you need to demonstrate your expertise and qualifications.

One method for establishing credibility is by featuring testimonials. Comments from others are perceived with greater credibility than descriptions of your features and benefits. This will help differentiate your business from the competition.

What are you doing to differentiate your web site and build credibility?

Generating leads is one of the most important objectives for a small business web site. If people come to your web site for solutions, you want as many of them as possible to contact you.

It is also desirable for your web site to differentiate people who are not ready to buy from people who are ready to make a purchase.

Visitors to you web site need to be given direction and incentives.

Does your web site prompt people to supply contact information and contact you? Is there motivation for them to give you their contact information?

Of course the most important goal of your web site should be to help make you money. If you sell services and products it should be easy for prospects to find them, along with comprehensive information about each product.

Ideally, you will want individual sell pages for each product or service. Again, you will want the content to discuss solutions to customers’ problems.

Is your web site helping you sell more of your products and services?

It is your customers’ problems that maintains your business. You need both customer problems and solutions to keep your business operating.

Customer problems are the fuel that provides the power to your marketing engine. Fueling your marketing engine requires a constant focus on customer problems. The better you can address customer problems the more powerful your marketing engine.

What are the concerns of your target market? What problems do they have that you can solve? What problems do they want solved?

Prospects want to see themselves and their concerns clearly identified in order to feel confident that you understand their needs. Don’t start talking about features and benefits until you have identified the problems that the prospects want to solved.

Switch to using your prospects problems as the core to your marketing message and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your marketing will accelerate your business.

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