You've been operating an online business for a while. You're not seeing the results you had expected. It seems that lots of people can tell you what is wrong, or what they think is wrong, but finding out what to do to make it right takes more work. Once you know all the things that are wrong and all the fixes, you must prioritize and decide what to do first.

Unsatisfactory Results: A Common Lament
This problem is not unique to you -- I encountered it myself. I published my site in August. Yes, I've had other commercial sites, but this is my site. If you pop over there, you'll find that the product being marketed is me. How, then, can I fail to take it personally when the site doesn't produce the results I had expected? My solution was to take on my own site as a consulting project and make recommendations as if the site was a client's site.

Getting Help with a Self-Assessment
If you don't have the ability, the time, or the knowledge to do a thorough self-assessment, then there's a site that can help. It's called AuditIt.com. AuditIt will evaluate your site and produce a 40+-page report on your site, assessing everything from how the site performs on a PDA to accessibility, to appropriateness of the tone, to uniformity of navigational tools across sections of the site. The figure below shows recommendations for a sample audit:

What's nice about the report is that it includes extensive recommendations for each element of the site that it evaluates. At the beginning of the report, there are recommendations for both short term and long term changes that reflect what the site can do to help the company reach its goals. A site cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. Depending on what your goals are, what you need to do to fix the site might be totally different. AuditIt bothers to ask, which is essential.

URL Checking Service
When I was investigating search engine services for my book last year, I was amazed that there wasn't a single company offering search engine reports - on the order of WebPosition Gold - as an ASP. I thought I should be able to go to a Web site, type in my URL, type in my keywords, select the search engines I wanted reported, then receive a report by mail - ideally by mail every week.

AuditIt also noticed that no one else was offering this service. Their reporting isn't as extensive as WebPosition Gold, but it is free. From this link, which isn't linked to their home page because it was in beta, you can request a weekly report of how many pages from your site are listed on each of the major search engines.

Success May Be Only Hours Away
Some stories have happy endings. After assessing what was wrong with my site, and what I needed to do to fix it, I picked two small tasks - tasks that I thought would have disproportionate results - and made them. It took less than eight hours. I was able to bump my site into the #1 and #8 positions on Google for two of my keywords (with comparable results on Yahoo!), and I was able to get my phone ringing for my consulting services again, after a long dry spell that coincided with the general downturn in tech.

You might not have to make huge, expensive changes to your site. But you shouldn't waste your time making any changes until you know what needs to be changed and what will give you the most dramatic results.

Alexis D. Gutzman is an author, speaker, and consultant on e-business and e-commerce topics. She's the producer of The Online Marketing Report. Her most recent book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena, was named one of the 30 best business books of this year. For up-to-date information about her research and speaking engagements, visit The Alexis Gutzman Group's Web site.