Four Simple Steps to Transform Your Website
by Christina on Wednesday 27th July, 2011 at 09:07 COMMENTS (0)
If you have a website that gets found in the search engines, generates leads, and converts those leads into prospects and paying customers then you don't need to read any further.
If you have a website sitting out there, doing little else than taking up space in the search engines you certainly need to keep reading and make your website into a valuable asset.
When clients first come to me all they are interested in is being at the top of the search engines, they think this is the magic answer to increasing their sales. More traffic is fine if you know what to do with them once they come into your website.
The purpose of your website should be to generate leads. You need to offer great content, and get search engine optimised. This will bring you the traffic that will then click through and provide their contact information so you can convert them from leads into paying customers.
Should you Blog?
Websites with blogs do better in the search engines, and they also generate more leads.
Create useful, valuable, interesting content. If you do not have the time or ability you should outsource your content creation to someone who knows what they are doing.
Great content will keep bringing people back to your website giving you more opportunities to turn them into a lead with different types of calls to action.
Do you want a motorway of traffic coming into your website, or a country lane? Use social media to promote your content, as long as it is valuable to your reader produce podcasts, presentations, photos, ebooks and newsletters. This gives you lots of different avenues to transform those visitors into sales. You give away the above for free whilst the visitor gives you their details in return.
Applying these four simple steps will transform your website:
1. Your website is your key asset - Audit it
Determine which keywords, content and links are your most important assets. You can use Google Analytics to determine which keywords, content and links work best for your site.
Remove any content that is performing badly, and ditch any keywords and links with low visitor numbers and high bounce rates. Hopefully you know which call to actions, or pages are converting leads, keep them ditch the rest. Identify your most valuable URLs and put redirects in place.
2. Website Design
Search engines see content not design, a clean crisp website with lots of content is better than one with lots of beautiful graphics, flash animation etc. Use a blog to create more content, and your website will be over 400 percent more likely to get indexed by search engines, 97 percent more likely to attract links, and will generate 55 percent more visitors than sites that don't maintain a blog.
3. Conversions
Make your call to actions simple and clear, ask for limited information, and always make sure the call to action appears above the fold on-screen. Track your conversion rates, this is the only way to find out if your call to action is working, if you think it can do better try something different, be that colour, wording or the location of the call to action on your page.
Don't take to long over testing different conversions, the quicker you get it right the quicker your sales will increase.
4. You don't need to know every metric
Keep to three or four metrics. The easier you make this for yourself the easier and quicker it will be to succeed and meet your goals.
You should only transform your website to improve the results it delivers for you, be that visitor numbers, better leads, or higher conversion rates of those leads into paying customers.
Don't change your website because it hasn't been done in a while. Focus on your goals and make them happen.
The Essex SEO Team
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