Content Strategy for Your Website
April 21, 2009
I was in a client meeting yesterday, discussing content strategy and how it relates to their need for SEO and better conversions. We’ve made some really good progress in a super-competitive area the last three months, but were having trouble converting visitors and wanted to expand our SEO footprint.
The CEO asked me, “Is it better to have several pages that are always changing, or to have a site that is constantly growing with new content?”
The VP of Sales laughed out loud when I answered that question, “Yes!”
We all know that fresh content is vital to SEO success. It’s also important for visitor conversion. And, it’s important to not only have your most prominent pages (home page, etc…) “freshen up” every now and then, it’s also important to push out new content on a regular basis.
From a search engine standpoint – it gets spiders coming back more frequently, which gets you indexed more thoroughly, more often, and often better. From a visitor standpoint, it gives you the opportunity to excite and engage the visitor more.
More and more, we are seeing that visitors need more than a catchy landing page, a great offer, or a slick form to turn in to leads or customers. Search is becoming less and less a direct conversion tool, and more of a sales process that you need to nurture in order to get the customer.
Of course, this rings true a little more for larger ticket item purchases than for, say, a book or pair of shoes.
What does this mean for your business? For one, you need to craft all your content with an eye for the ultimate goal – conversion. You need to come up with a schedule and stick to it (this is much harder than it sounds). You will need to create content that is interesting and useful for someone, even if they aren’t your customer. You need to give options to share your content (social bookmarking buttons, email this buttons, etc…) – and encourage people to use them.
In short – your website needs to start to become a combination of promotion and enhanced conversion strategies, and real substance.
Improve Your Business Website
April 14, 2009
In – JUST ONE EASY STEP!
Sorry, I work up early this morning and ended up cooking breakfast while an infomercial was on.
Anyway – here’s a quick idea to drastically improve your business’s website: Improve the image quality!
So many great businesses have websites that look awful – a big reason for this is fuzzy, poorly sized, poorly managed images and product photos.
Here are some things to look for in choosing an image:
1) High Quality/Resolution
2) Color matching with the rest of your site
3) Does it “Pop”
4) Is it “selling”
What this means: Use only High-res images that have been sized appropriately in an image editing program. Make sure it matches somewhat with your website’s colors – and is sharp enough to draw attention on the page and guide custmers to do what you wan them to.
Old Marketing Pro Tip – visitors love pictures of people – and they will look at the spot on the page the people in the photo are looking at! This means, if you want someone to read a certain section of your website, a picture whose eyes are looking in that direction will help.
For product photos, there are a few things you can do to make sure your site:
- Crop in to show the most interesting detail of the product.
- Remove backgrounds, replace with a white or gray background
- Use a drop shadow to make the image pop
- Auto-Adjust Color levels and use a sharpening filter in your favorite editing software
- if you don’t have editing software, get some!
Improve your PPC ROI in an Hour
April 8, 2009
Here’s a quick tip to improve the conversion rates for some of your pay per click keywords:
If you’re using broad match – stop. I don’t mean completely stop – that would be silly. I mean stop and think for a second. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and spend an hour with your analytics and see what you can learn.
Here are two things you should be able to find:
- Longer Keyphrases that aren’t converting. Your keyword bid on “widgets” might be sending lots of folks looking for “free widgets” even though you charge for yours. This means you should add “free” as a negative keyword in that campaign. That will save you money.
- Longer Keyphrases that are converting. Your keyword bid on “widgets” also sends a lot of clicks for “red widgets”, and those people convert like crazy. So, break “red widgets” out into a different ad group, phrase or exact match it, and save money on click costs and watch your conversions jump even higher.
Those are the two primary tenents of keyword optimization – but you have to have the analytics in place to tell. If you’re broad matching hundreds or thousands of words, and not doing this on a regular basis (meaning daily if you can) you’re wasting money.