Keith
Five secrets, to more web traffic and sales
- Keith
- September 28, 2020
- 11:24 pm
- No Comments
Keeping your website alive pays off
Your website must stay alive to get more web traffic because it’s your salesperson on the job 24/7, a resource for your clients and visitors, and an information center where company policy is always available for staff.
Unseen issues can be preventing your website from getting the results you expect. Keeping your website alive is essential. Even if you make positive changes today on your site, it does take time for Google and Bing, the two leading search engines, to acknowledge those changes and give you a positive rank.
You can get a free basic SEO report from us upon request.
This post will address some basics to improve website performance. These basics will help you to get the results you’d expect when you invest in your websites. There are many more than five secrets; These five are essentials, but these will set you on your way.
The challenges
We know running day-to-day business affairs has challenges. It’s near impossible to keep up with web technologies as well. You may be aware of how wonderful the web is when you use your tablet, laptop, smartphone to access all types of information. How do you get that technology to work to your companies advantage? I’ll get to that, but here is a conversation I had recently to illustrate my point.
A conversation with a friend
I have a friend, and as a friend, I’ll not reveal his name. Let’ call him Jessie. He’s an expert in his industry and a business owner. I find it exhilarating to work with folks who have a passion for what they do.
I had the pleasure of producing some offline marketing materials for him. He confessed how difficult it is for him to find clients.
I asked him about his website and if he’s getting clients from it. He said, “Not even one!” He reveals he physically sends the prospect to look at his site to see what type of work he does, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I asked him, ” Have you thought of updating your site and doing digital marketing?” He said, “Why!; I don’t get business from my site,” he replied. “I wonder why!” sarcastically, I thought to myself.
Websites are my business, and I examine anyone’s website I do business with; he revealed his site hasn’t had a facelift in five years. I knew that and was giving him the benefit of the doubt. He had concluded that investing any money in his website was a waste of money.
His product’s shelf life lasts about fifteen to twenty years, so he continuously looks for clientele. He relies on word of mouth and the alliances formed in his industry, and sometimes business is a trickle.
If you’re not getting the web traffic you expect, stay with me here, and I’ll explain how digital marketing works and SEO to get more web traffic.
What you don’t know can hurt your business.
Internet marketing is a fast-evolving technology; staying on top of it is essential as a business owner because many are using it with excellent results.
Some of you already know why your website is a critical element in your business, and a well-implemented marketing strategy is financially rewarding.
Sites can quickly die from inactivity, as I will explain in a moment. Here’s our first consideration.
Knowing Your Intended Audience.
Focus on your intended or your target audience first. A good look at your former clients should give you a clearer picture of who your new clients or target audience may be.
It would be best to answer any questions that your product or service solves for them in your marketing content and on your website. If you solve for your audience, and your product or service is the answer to their prayers. I guarantee you have found your next customer. It’s essential you know your prospective clients.
Your business has to offer a solution or offer something of value. Value is subjective. Your product or service is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.
Do your research. Find out exactly who needs your product, service or solution.
Persona building
A persona is a fictional character built by marketers that reflect data collected from present clients, your competitor’s clients, and people’s demographics using your products and services or likely to use these.
If you have customers at present, get to know them well. What’s their age range. Likes dislikes are they women, men, young adults. What social media platforms they love to use. The more you know, the better.
You’ll need to take stock of their creed colour background. Start with one persona and widening out. You will be speaking personally to that person who needs your product, solution, or service when producing marketing materials or writing blogs.
Now that you have built several personas, you would be better able to target individual audiences and track and tweak based on the results.
Tracking your effort is vital.
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? I’m sure you’ve heard that one. Of course, it makes a sound experience tells you so. In marketing, however, you want to know more. Where did it fall? What caused it to fall? How loud was it when it fell? I used this example to emphasize why details are necessary for your marketing. It tells you where best to spend your time and money based on the results—tracking the results of your activity is essential.
You use reporting systems to check weekly to see if you got your target audience right. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager are free tools offered by Google. There’s a learning curve for these products, but they are essential.
Likely, there are competitors in your industry. Suppose a visitor leaves a question, whether through social channels, email or web forms, that need a prompt response? You’ll need to earn a visitor’s trust. Remember, consumers can be at different stages in their buyer’s journey. Tracking the results of your marketing efforts is vital as well as Developing a content strategy is necessary to keep visits interested.
Website Design Why Important
The word intuitive is a word we hear a lot of and for a good reason. It means website design is important. Getting around should be logical or intuitive, almost with unconscious effort. Think of customer service. Guide your user’s visit. The term UI, UX (User interface or User experience) design may come to mind. There’s a hold mindset on how people, in general, perceive the layout of a site. With good website design, you lead your visitor’s eyes to your offer.
Since visitors can be at different stages of the buyer’s journey, some are just considering what to do and looking for more information. Others may have already been looking around and decide this is what they want; they shouldn’t have to beat around your site to get it. Here again, designing for your audience or personas is essential. Useful websites are designed to consider all personas in the buyer’s journey.
Keep Things Fresh, Consistently Solving For Your Audience
Here again, it’s essential to keep your content informative. Depending on your audience, you might want to keep things to the point if they are busy folks.
Your research would reveal who your audience is. If visitors love to read, storytelling might be an approach. The bottom line here is to help visitors see you as on the pulse of your industry, and you know your product or service well. Potential clients all want to know that they are in safe hands.
To have visitors coming back, you will need a content strategy or schedule.
There should be more to read and think about on the return visit, not the same stuff you posted on social media or information they’ve read the last time they visited. All I’m saying is there should be room for them to dig deeper.
If visitors feel educated and more productive, enriched after a visit to your site, you’ll be winning.
SEO (Search engine optimization)
SEO is a highly complex subject but a necessary one. Search engine optimization is a specialized field. It has to do with how search engines see your site’s internal structure—the keywords used on your site’s pages, posts and articles, the links your site uses internally and externally. It’s important because that’s how the public finds your site through search queries typed into their browsers.
For these technical reasons, it’s imperative to keep things fresh. Search engines use bots, also called crawlers. These bots ( programs ) crawl through your websites to see if anything has changed on your site, good or bad, new links or broken ones. They go through your headlines, articles, looking for updates. If nothing changes, they move on and tell the search engine; there’s nothing new here. If you produce unique content, the bot indexes it so the searcher can find it.
Google or Bing and other search engines will lower your search page rank if nothing changes for an extended period; anyone looking for your product or service may not find you in an organic search. Unless you tell someone to look for your information like my friend Jessie, that’s not organic. Here is a bit more about SEO.
An Ounce of Prevention From Sure Death
When you are sick, your body tells your brain something up, you say to yourself, “I don’t feel well,” and you look for the cure. That’s because you have an internal reporting system.
As with your body, websites need an internal reporting system, and there are many. So many it’s baffling, which is best. There are free ones and paid ones. This discussion will not be an in-depth look at these tools, just an awareness check to see how it can be helpful.
Google Analytics: mentioned earlier, is a google free tool. It allows you the ability to see if your site is being visited and by how many. It also helps you see where visitors go on your website, how long they stay, what pages are getting the most response.
You can analyze your visitor’s behaviour. Think about the new information you uploaded. You would want to know, are visitors engaging with my blog post? Google Analytics will help immensely with this.
Google Search Console: Another free tool.
It’s helpful with your search engine optimization (SEO). Remember the bots we talked about earlier?
These bots crawl your site and report to google, and then to you (if you have signed up for GSC, verifying you are the owner of your site), it issues a report as to whether your site has any issues, broken links, how well are pages displaying on desktop, tablet and mobile.
From time to time, things break on websites silently. With Google Search Console setup, you’ll get a notification if something goes wrong, if someone installed malware on your site, or God forbade, hack your site.
To get this type of reporting, you must place a piece of code on your website’s pages. All social media platforms have a similar kind of system for reporting but primarily for reporting marketing traffic. With all the reports in front of you, you’ll be more informed about the health of your website.
Other Things To Consider
I have to admit, being a business owner has its challenges. Understanding what one needs to do is essential. That’s why I wrote a simplified overview of what’s necessary to keep your website alive and increase your web traffic, leads and sales.
Marketing campaigns, whether paid or organic, takes considerable effort, time and experience. There are many hats to wear and nearly impossible to complete single-handed since campaigns have time limits and budget constraints, not to mention the technical requirements.
Here’s my advice; Wear one hat. Know what you want to accomplish and by what time. Let us do the heavy lifting for you. Let’s at least have this discussion. No one will pressure you in this organization. Our philosophy, no matter what stage you are at in your business endeavour, there is a solution to your marketing needs, and we’ll find it for you.
Well, it’s rap. Please let us know your thoughts. Have a good one.
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