Your website is most likely the most important online (and possibly offline, too) real estate your company owns. Websites not only provide information and validation for your products and services, but are also an effective branding and lead generation engine when used correctly. This edition of business tips from the top comes from business leaders like you to focus on how to optimise your company website to attract visitors and convert them to leads.
Attract
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is used to obtain high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (from Webopedia.com) and is crucial to the success and visibility of your site—if you want your target market to find you online. SEO is complicated, time consuming, and optimisation parameters change often. Unless you have the knowledge base and talent already in-house, SEO optimisation is an activity that this best outsourced. This service can often be expensive and, as so many things in life, you get what you pay for.
Keep your website content current and timely. Updating your site content periodically will not only keep you site fresh for prospect validation purposes, but will also help increase your site SEO rankings in search engines. One really simple way to do this is to attach a blog to your website and blog regularly. Not only will this position you as an expert in your market, but it will also signal to search engines that fresh, relevant content is being published to your site regularly. Create a blog posting schedule for yourself and stick to it. At a bare minimum, your company should post a blog once a week.
If you haven’t done so already, set up a Google Analytics account for your website. This is a free tool that—at a bare minimum—allows you to track the number of visits to your site, page views and bounce rates. On a more advanced level, you can use Google Analytics to set up goals, tracking where traffic is coming from and how well visitors are converting into leads.
Tracking these metrics carefully will provide you the basis for where you can prioritise and focus your web optimisation efforts. Your basic goal should be to increase traffic and conversation rates, while decreasing your bounce rate.
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Convert
Once you have a viewer on your site, how do you turn site browsers into buyers? One tactic is to use a “Can we help you?” box that pops up after the visitor has been on your site for a pre-determined period of time. This box can be in the form of a instant messenger, or a short form where the visitor fills in their name and information for an immediate phone call. If you do not have the staff to answer these messages right away, there are services that can respond for you, using information you provide.
Often, a visitor is not ready to purchase on the first visit—or they become distracted and leave the site for other reasons. Many companies use a tactic referred to as remarketing or retargeting, which displays certain advertisements targeted to site visitors across a display network. There are many services that you can hire to manage a remarketing campaign for you, or you can manage your own through platforms such as Bizo’s remarketing self-service tool or Google Adwords.
Marketing automation platforms have become mainstream in many marketing departments, both large and small. Most of these tools allow you to track website traffic sources, social media reach and interactions, and collect leads through online forms to intelligently market to according to where they are in the marketing funnel. Learn more about marketing automation platforms.
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