If you're like many business owners, you probably rely heavily on your organic search rankings to gauge and measure your SEO performance. When you see your website listed on the first page for a relevant keyword, you're happy. If you see your website at or near the top of the first page, you're ecstatic! When you lose an organic ranking, you're upset and when you fall off the first page, you're downright pissed off. Sound about right?

Suppose you own a small contracting company with a couple trucks. Whether you operate out of Washington, DC, Philly, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other metro area, you're competing against dozens of comparably sized contractors AND at least three or four companies that are considerably larger than you. The larger contracting companies most likely have bigger advertising budgets, fancier websites, more trucks on the road, hundreds of online testimonials and much, much more.

According to a study conducted by Fireclick, an industry leading provider of website analytics services, the average conversion rate for websites (worldwide) is just a hair over 2%. Depressing, isn't it? But, before you set out in search of a bridge to leap off of, consider this: Blue Corona has dozens of clients with website conversion rates that exceed 15%!

Given the potential value of a conversion and with such a large discrepancy between different sites, it's natural to wonder:

Before you hire an SEO company, pause for a minute and ask yourself, "how will I measure success?" If the answer is something along the lines of, "increased visibility for relevant keywords" or, "more first page rankings," you're setting yourself up to hire the wrong SEO firm and you're going to waste an awful lot of money in the process of finding the right long-term partner.

In the words of Stephen Covey, "begin with the end in mind."

Do you know what percentage of your website visitors are coming from a mobile device or smart phone? If you're like most business owners, you probably have no idea. But you need this information in order to see just how important having a mobile-friendly version of your website is - and for many businesses, the importance of mobile is growing by the day.

Look at this:

If you want to get more leads and sales from your website, stop treating it like a brochure and start treating it like a sales rep. Brochures are a waste of money. With brochures, your marketing team (or YOU) spends weeks trying to come up with the "look" and "messaging" and more often than not that box of brochures ends up sitting in the corner of office supply closet collecting dust. At best you distribute a few and they receive an occasional glance before being tossed into the circular file. Sales reps, on the other hand, produce results.