Adaptation seems to be a common experience amongst most small companies that are fortunate enough to be experiencing growth amidst this difficult economic climate. We are no exception.

In assessing our current landscape and evaluating new business opportunities, one of the key issues that we've been examining relates to our fundamental identity; or, more specifically, how we position ourselves as a service provider.

For the past several years, we've described ourselves in terms of the services that we offer. We've positioned ourselves in terms of "what we do." As time continues to pass, we find this approach to be inherently limiting. And apart from this, it is quite inaccurate.

We are a boutique online business development agency. This is somewhat embarrassing, inasmuch as it points to a very real shortfall in our perspective and ability to capitalize upon ripe opportunity up unto this point, but we've had the #1 organic ranking in Google for the keyword phrase "online business development" for the past several years and have not received a single online lead.

It is only recently that we began to think about the implications of that fact. Why haven't we received a single inquiry from the visitors that have arrived at the site from that keyword search? From the hundreds/thousands of visits over the past few years from that specific query, it is very peculiar that the organic ranking has not driven a single lead.

It occurs to me that we must not be delivering visitors a website that matches their expectations when they type "online business development" into a search engine. The irony in this realization is that it is the sort of analysis that we perform for our clients on a daily basis, and yet - for our own site - the simple fact has eluded us for several years now.

I hypothesize that the root of the problem is the way that we describe ourselves on the website. Since we've grown accustomed to identifying with the services that we provide rather than the solutions that we represent, we're providing visitors with a menu when they're likely looking for a prescription. In short: we are not satisfying our visitors' intent.

So we'll be repositioning ourselves & redesigning our site to test this theory. And - at the end of the day - a site that speaks to turnkey solutions as opposed to individual services will be much more aligned with the reality of our daily experience.

Still, I can't help but be humbled by the fact that something so very simple took us so long to recognize.