As much as search engine optimization is about maximizing results, it’s also about fixing what’s broke. Getting your marketing efforts up to speed and functioning on all cylinders involves continually evaluating the performance of your website and making real-time changes and improvements that give your clients what they’re looking for the first time (and every time) they visit your site.

For example, I recently read an article by search engine strategist Carrie Hill that does a terrific job of explaining the primary factors that cause site visitors to leave (or ‘bounce’) off a web page immediately after landing on it. In marketing metrics, this is referred to as bounce rate. When your site’s bounce rate is low (desirable), visitors are taking the time to learn about you and your services; when it’s high, they’re leaving before your marketing message has a chance to captivate them and move them to contact you.

Hill offers helpful tips for lowering high bounce rates. Of utmost importance is making sure that your pages match the search query term that brought them to your site in the first place. This is one of the reasons why the right keywords are vital to search engine optimization.

Next, what do visitors see when they land on your website pages? Two tools—Attention Wizard from Site Turners and ClickTale—help you see what your visitors see when they land on your web pages.

Finally, is it abundantly clear to potential clients what they should do when they land on one of your web pages? This part of your internet marketing strategy, often referred to as conversion path, is what turns a site visitor into a new client. Hill’s advice: “Make your conversion path so easy to follow that a monkey could figure it out.”