The down economy has many thinking this is an ideal time to use Web sites to steal customers from weakened competition. Consider planning to keep these areas of your online strategy sharp to ward off rivals.

Check these hot spots

Changes other marketers plan to make in the second half of 2009:

• 62% will clean up and reorganize home pages and product pages
• 49% will sharpen navigation, and
• 47% will improve on-site search.

Spread resources out

But before spending lots of resources on the home page, it’s smart to check where most visitors land.

The reason? On average, only 21% of visitors enter company Web sites through the front door — the home page, found a recent MarketingSherpa.com study. The rest land on inside pages that search engines link to.

So it’s worth focusing most resources on updating the hottest landing spots — interior product pages.