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:

Whether your company intends on investing in social media marketing or not (it should), there are 4 critically important reasons you should reserve your social media profiles today. While I could easily write an entire blog post about why your company MUST be on social media, I know there are a lot of companies out there who still just don’t buy into the movement (it's really more of a seismic shift).

The internet has quickly become one of the world’s greatest resources for information about... well, just about anything. For better or worse, a certain level of authority comes with what is written on the web. So when a dissatisfied customer goes online to write a nasty rant about how one of your employees tracked mud throughout his house, this is a reflection on your business that is very public, visible, and archived in history for anybody who searches your company name.

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."

Search engines drive the majority of traffic on the web. If you want your company's website to rank well organically, you must make it easy for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to find, crawl (read) and index. Plain text (as opposed to images, pictures, podcasts, videos) is the easiest form of content for search engines to find and index, so getting the best content on your website is critical to getting more website traffic, leads and booked jobs.

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.