In any economy, smart marketers and business owners are looking to get more customers for less money. Search engine optimization takes an existing asset, your website, and gets it seen by prospective buyers – people who are searching for exactly the product or service you’re offering! But like any tool, you can make this visibility work better for you if you’re prepared for it, and using it correctly.
Bang or Fizzle?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is powerful because it puts your website in the face of people who are looking for your products or services. But getting people to your site is only half the battle.
Most website owners sign up with an SEO service and sit back and prepare themselves for a flood of new business. What they should be preparing themselves for is a flood of new traffic. As your website goes up in the search engine rankings, more and more prospects will find you. But if the website isn’t doing its job, people leave quickly without becoming customers.
Preparing Your Site for SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can learn a lot from its Pay-Per-Click (PPC) cousin.
PPC gets much of its power from landing pages and contrived sales funnels. These marketing tools allow you to control everything your potential customer sees and does.
By applying some of the same marketing techniques used with PPC, you can vastly increase the number of sales you convert from all this new traffic SEO is bringing you.
Don’t Focus Only on Your Homepage
When a customer finds you on a search engine, they can land anywhere within your site. This means every single page on your site needs to be treated as a potential landing page. If you have great calls to action and offers on your home page, but you’re not advertising them throughout your site, you could be losing potential sales or even confusing buyers.
Create Sales Funnels
Sales funnels are simplified sites (landing pages) that give limited options and funnel users into the action you want them to take. Websites have a lot more navigation options than a landing page, but you should still add funnel components and copywriting that moves your prospects to purchase. Make sure that you hit the three major types of potential customer and provide information that targets each type:
- Those who aren’t sure what they want.
- Those who know what they want and are comparing companies.
- Those who are ready to buy.
5 Second Test
Five seconds is generous. In reality you have about 2-3 seconds to convince the customer they are in the right place. Our brains scan information very quickly, and if you don’t have a clear purpose, clear message, and a clear call to action, your customers will look for it somewhere else. Test every possible page that a prospect might land on with someone who isn’t familiar with your site. Give them five seconds or less to tell you what your company sells, and what their next step is. If they don’t know, no one else will either.
Conversion Optimization
The three steps above are part of a process known as conversion optimization. Conversion optimization looks at all aspects of your website and complements any search marketing you are doing by making the website convert more of the traffic into sales. Without conversions, all that great traffic is wasted. Before you embark on SEO, make sure your site is prepared to turn that traffic into customers. Contact us for a complimentary site review.
About the author: Jeune Ortiz is VP of Marketing and Creative Director at future-ink. With more than 20 years of experience in graphic design and marketing, Jeune brings extensive knowledge and creativity to each website and internet marketing solution to grow your business.
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