Your potential customers are being stolen from you every day. They are going to the competition, rather than choosing you. Your business is haemorrhaging money as a result and you need to put a stop to this dreadful situation. Well, OK, it might not be that bad, but unless you own 100% of the market you are in, your competitors are doing something you are not.

Online, you can find out why your competitors are beating you quite easily. Your competition is the group of businesses who appear above you in a search engine listing for your keywords. You might not think they are your competitors, but the users of the search engines do. That's because almost all the clicks from search engines go to sites listed in the first five positions. If you are below that, you are losing out to the competition.

Now, search engine optimisation experts will tell you how to get into the top 5 places. It is actually quite simple - have plenty of highly focused content on your site, add material every day and have plenty of links to other relevant sites. You also need to get mentioned on other sites, like Ecademy. Getting high search engine rankings is the easy bit.

The difficulty you face when losing out to competitors is how their sites convert prospects into customers. It's never a good idea to be too general about these things, but what you will find is that those people whose web sites work better than yours tend to offer a mix of the following aspects which help the conversion process.

1. They collect the email address of visitors - it's the number one priority.

2. They keep in regular touch with their site visitors and make it clear they will do this.

3. They make it easy for prospects to get in touch - email, phone, fax, postal address, instant messenger etc.

4. They provide plenty of free information - material that other sites protect because it is seen as intellectual property.

5. They 'talk' directly to the viewer as an individual.

6. They have a single focus, which is precisely on the solution to the prospect's problem.

Depending on your sector, other things may be important too. So, you ought to check out the top ten web sites in each of your keyword search terms. Look at their sites and see how they are achieving their results. Learn from their successful methods and apply them to your web site.

You will discover that the sites that get high search engine ranking AND which get the best conversion rates are usually devoted to a single topic. So instead of having one web site which deals with all of your business, the greatest success comes from having individual web sites devoted to the specific problems your prospects face. Hard work, I know, but the results will tell.

Graham Jones

Graham Jones is a professional speaker and psychologist. He has specialised in the psychology of communications and has a particular interest in how we use the Internet. He speaks about the need for businesses to think differently about the Internet. When he is not speaking about the psychology of the Internet, Graham is helping people overcome their fear of public speaking.