If you’ve decided to build or convert your company’s website so that it’s better optimized for search engines, don’t forget about the second phase of SEO, conversion.
If your site shows up well in search engines, if you or your SEO company has done meticulous keyword research and selected only the most profitable, if you’ve placed SEO content on the main pages of your website and your landing pages, if you’ve conducted a thorough link-building campaign to improve your site’s popularity with the search engines, if you’ve started a social media marketing (blogs, Twitter, Facebook) campaign to reach targeted visitors and to grow your brand loyalty,
none of all this will do you much good if your visitors don’t convert into buyers or, at the least, to people who:
- download a free report on your site
- join your mailing list
- become a subscriber to your free newsletter
In other words, even if you don’t convert visitors to buyers on their first stop at your website, by converting them into active participants on your website you’ll have helped turn them into becoming customers.
So you or your SEO company’s second job on your website is to make sure your site’s conversion rate improves.
To do this, try the following
If you don’t already know your unique selling proposition (USP), you should sit down and figure out what makes you different from your competitors. (For example, if you’re a plumber who’s been in business 30 years, that’s a USP. If you’re a long-time plumber who’s gone “green,” those two differentials make for a terrific USP) Once you know your USP, make it very clear on your website and landing pages.
Make sure your site’s content clearly points out your products’/services’ benefits. Highlight benefits (how it solves your target market’s problems) over features (it’s red, it’s a course that takes three weeks to complete, it the newest router on the market, etc.).
Make information about your products and services very easy for your visitors to find. Change your site’s navigation if necessary.
Make sure your landing pages have the keywords you used in other pages and make sure these landing pages also are relevant to your site’s content.
Track and analyze the results of your various marketing campaigns.
So, remember, a good SEO campaign doesn’t really end when you optimize your site’s pages. Make sure you tweak those pages to entice your site’s visitors to stick around and purchase from you.