Without a good brand structure, your site is irrelevant. It cannot fix your operational challenges, but if the stories are properly positioned, it can help address system issues (read this column for more on best practices).

Your development site should serve several purposes:

1. Provide a very simply navigable form so that prospects can quickly tell you they are interested.
2. Provide high-level details of costs so that underqualified candidates don’t waste your time and qualified candidates know the approximates of what they are getting into.
3. Provide solutions in the content that answer any negative questions that exist externally about your brand.

With a stable internal content strategy, now you can go to work driving traffic into it. Frankly, driving traffic is the easy part.

In a world of pay-per-click, you get to actually do that – pay per click, meaning if you want traffic and you have a budget, magically they will work together.

Often times, though, traffic is misconstrued as the ultimate solution. Don’t simply do PPC for the sake of doing PPC without having a plan in place. A few things to consider:

1. If I were you, I wouldn’t pay for my brand name. Far too often brands pay for their name with PPC. Why? Your .com should come up at the top of a search.
2. Don’t do blanket campaigns. In today’s digital data world, you can be specific about your targets. You want people in Oak Park, IL, to visit your site? Go get them to visit your site.
3. You saying that your brand is great is expected. Don’t simply drive traffic through your site – drive it through validating content sites, too.

If you are creating a key performance indicator for your site, it certainly needs to start with traffic; then evolve into targeted traffic; then turn into qualified targeted traffic. If you are confident in your website but are not getting leads, try evolving your content strategy. Change things up. Don’t over-invest in the site – try investing more externally. Start conversations around the web so that people are telling people to visit your site. Leverage social media – including your own and your competitor’s (with targeted ads).

Traffic is the most important KPI in the lead generation process, but if your brand has bumps and bruises that turn off candidates in the sales process, all of the traffic in the world won’t change the emotional turnoffs the buyers experience on the outside (e.g. validation, under performing unit-level volumes, lack of belief in leadership, etc.).