Website conversion is the art and science of getting more of the people who come to your website to take the action that you want them to take – fill out your contact form, read your whitepapers, sign up for your newsletter, or (in the case of e-commerce) buy something. For a company that is trying to build offline business, this action is typically something that gets prospects into the sales pipeline through some form of online registration. For a company or organization that is trying to build awareness, this action can be a number of things – getting visitors to a certain page of the site, getting them to stay longer at the site, or getting them to tell a friend about the site.

The critical point that is commonly overlooked in a ranking-centric mindset is that no number of high search engine positions will address the real problem if your website is not serving as an effective marketing and sales tool. And, as I have said many times before, the overall net effect of raising your conversion rate from one to two percent is the same net effect as doubling your traffic, and it is almost always easier. Increasing the number of visitors to a site that does not convert them effectively is like pumping high performance gasoline into a car with engine trouble – it might help the car to run a little bit better, but if you’d done repairs before adding the premium fuel, it really would have hummed.