Optimising your website to maximise inbound marketing needs careful planning and attention. A thorough understanding of your customers and what experience you want them to encounter online needs to be established. As an Inbound Marketing Agency we strongly urge you to optimise your website is to attract visitors, leads and new customers, this includes having clear and well written content, a user friendly design and careful user focused keyword planning.
So what do we mean by optimisation?
First and foremost you need to have content that is optimised for customers. This means having the right content at the right time depending on where your customers are in the buyers journey. You may need content that is designed to educate your customers, as well as content that attracts and encourages individuals to make a purchase.
You also need to make sure that the content is optimised for search engines such as Google. This means ensuring that your content is easy to understand and crawl, as well as encouraging search engines to rank our pages according to the target keywords for each page/post. Inbound marketing will help you turn visitors into leads and customers.
Searcher Intent
The key to a successful website is to have a very clear picture of what your customers (and potential customers) want and need. Understanding your customers and the buyers journey will enable you to develop content that focuses on each stage of their journey. Google Adwords is a very good tool to understand the words and phrases that your customers use to reach their desired content and would be a very good starting point.
As we have become more and more accustomed to using Google, we’ve quickly learnt how to adapt our search queries to reach the information we want. For example, an individual looking to book some beauty treatments in Birmingham may begin their search with the phrase ‘beauty treatments’. The results returned may not be specific to their needs, so they then begin to modify their search for example to ‘facial treatments in Birmingham’, or ‘hollywood waxing in Birmingham’. We have become accustomed to using Google and thus have learn’t how to modify our search queries to get precisely the information we want. It’s arming yourself with this kind of customer knowledge, that will help you focus your efforts and develop user orientated content.
You may also have individuals who perhaps want to ascertain the best advice for before and after waxing treatments. This kind of content helps you retain your customers because you are offering good post purchase advice.
The key to optimisation is to develop content that fulfills each stage of the buyers journey. Good content encourages readers to move to the next stage of the journey; they become leads, a customer and then happy customers. Take a good look at our home page. The content is designed to appeal to those who want to learn why inbound marketing is important, why your website should be mobile and tablet friendly, plus a live inbound marketing case study on how a £500 website investment generated over £35k in sales. I bare no bones about it, this is content that is designed to encourage individuals to move through the buyers journey, ultimately to buy into my services.
The Buyers Journey
The stages of the buyers journey are: attract, convert, close and delight. The first 3 stages are aimed at converting visitors into leads and then customers. The delight stage is aimed at ensuring you have happy customers. This means devising content that seeks to help your customers with their purchase. Learn here how to create a buyer persona and content that drives organic traffic. A simple example of customer orientated content is a user guide or operating instructions. This kind of contents serves to assist your customers with their purchase and to ensure a smooth transition from purchase to use.
What you should do now
If you are serious about having a great website, you should read my blog, it’s packed with ideas and suggestions to help improve your site.
If you’d like me to dramatically improve your website and bring you new customers, visit my website designs for small businesses page and then contact me for more information.
And if you have any comments or questions about this article, contact me.
