What do visitors think of your website? Do they resonate with your presence then buy your products (either directly or through your retail channels)? When someone comes to your site do they say: "I get it, this works for me" or do they say: "what is this company trying to tell me?"

Unless you know what goes through the heads of your site visitors how can you know if you are leaving money on the table? You might think people are "getting it" only to find they are missing your main messages completely.

The best way to dig into an analysis like this is to start with some basic usability testing. This does not have to be expensive nor terribly time consuming. Because of the nature of the internet, we can't consistently predict user behavior based on our own experiences.

You may have something huge and obvious (to you) on your site and find out people just don't see it. This is because there is so much instant information on the internet we have become accustomed to scanning very quickly for what we are looking for and leaving just as quickly if we don't find it.

How many times have you been on a site with a goal in mind and you say "how the heck do I.....?" Since you and your web team designed your site it will always be obvious to you how to achieve the intended goals.

The bad news is no single person can judge what is best for your website. But the good news is it doesn't take a large group of people to identify the main problems.

Let's say you test three people and all of them told you that your "About Us" page didn't provide a concise message about the company. Or they told you the text was overwhelming on your product pages and they would want to leave your site and visit a competitor. Or they all agreed they got frustrated when trying to find a dealer. These are issues that would frustrate most site users.

Usability testing also stops those strategy meetings that drive everyone nuts. You have most likely been in a few. "Why do we have three clicks to get to the main product page?" "Our site is just not exciting." "The CEO said he wants some flash content on the home page."

By doing usability testing you provide hard data to analyze with your team. It's down and dirty research and it really works. Another thing to remember when the discussions heat up is that you are not trying to prove one path is right or another is wrong. No finger pointing allowed! You are gathering data to analyze - just like any other business development plan.

It's never too early to test either. Are you looking at creating some major changes to your website? Why not take the basic sketches, wireframes or PowerPoint documents and show them to other people in your company for their input? Grab some customers and show them the proposed changes. Grab three people in your target market and give them an Amazon gift card worth $25. That $75 is a lot cheaper than fixing the issues after the site has been redesigned!

There's a bit more to it but honestly not much. Once you prepare and go through a usability test you now can perform these tests whenever you need some user validation. Site analytics tools provide invaluable data and are highly recommended. But these tools can't tell you why users chose a particular behavior. That is the job of usability testing.

Companies spend a good deal of their marketing budgets on website development. Yet few of them know if the decisions they make are optimized to convert customers to buyers.

Especially in these challenging economic times we need all the customers we can get. Don't leave money on the table. Do the testing.

If you need some advice on how to proceed with site testing let me know. You'll be an expert in no time and a hero to your CEO and your sales team.