Posts tagged ROI

Maximize Your Web Content

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We’ve made the case several times that a challenging economy is probably the worst time to slash your online marketing efforts.

And for those following this sound advice, it also makes sense to optimize every piece of web content that you produce and publish, both from a sales conversion and SEO standpoint.

Though it may seem like common sense, many authors forget to figure out what they’re trying to say before they start writing, and thus waste resources creating content that doesn’t achieve its potential or goals. Here are some tips to maximize your web writing:

Tip #1 – Create an Outline

Outlines are useful tools for giving your article or webpage structure, but if you’re not a big fan of outlining, at least answer the following questions before you start writing:

Who am I writing for? What’s my ideal audience?

What do I want my readers to learn from this article?

How will I explain/prove my point?

Tip #2 – Be Informative

Readers seek informative content, so provide the “give” in your article body and leave the “take” for your Resource Box or website. The quality of your information should make a good impression by providing value to the reader, not leaving them wanting more. Resist the temptation to sell in your articles.

Tip #3 – Share Your Experience…

You’re an expert in your field or niche, your readers are not. Don’t worry about making your writing sound smart, just think of some questions your readers will have and then answer them. Use article templates to help you structure the information in your article and generate new ideas.

Tip #4 – …But Not All At Once

You have a lot of knowledge, so you’re understandably excited to share it. But be careful not to overwhelm your readers. Break up large topics into smaller components, in separate articles. This gives you more articles to write and won’t scare readers with extremely long articles.

Tip #5 – Consider Hiring a Ghostwriter

Weigh your options. Is your business better served if you outsource the article writing (or blogging, newsletter or web content writing) and focus on other aspects of your business instead? Return on Investment is all about taking your available resources and using them in the most effective way. This is especially true during tough economic times, when the reduced overhead of freelance partners has the biggest financial impact.

It doesn’t matter how big your business is, or if you’re from New York, Boston and Washington DC to Los Angeles, San Fransisco and Vancouver, Hat Trick Associates can help you build your web content online. (If you happen to be from one of these cities, the fact that I included your hometown might be a reason you found this page, for example!) Contact us to learn more about how your website content / text can help your customers find you, too.

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5 Steps To Create Content That Converts…& Increases Your SEO

Getting “found” online is the end goal of your content and SEO initiatives, in addition to the conversion of your web visitors into customers too, of course.

And it really wasn’t all that long ago that you could effectively grow your business or share your ideas online by “interrupting” prospective customers with Push methods such as banner advertising, unsolicited email messages, or other off-line (and old school!) methods like cold calling. But business people grew weary of being targeted by outbound marketing and promotions long ago, and the technologies in use today have become far better at blocking these methods.

Businesses and people in general have also changed the way that they shop and learn, primarily utilizing search engines, social networking sites and blogs to find the information that they need. “Pull” or inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn. Here are five tips that you can use to help yourself “get found” online:

1. Start with an extraordinary idea

The days of needing a huge advertising budget to spend on marketing and PR to promote your ideas are long gone. Today, truly unique or extraordinary ideas can find many ways to spread like wildfire on their own online, without any significant expenditure. And by comparison, those ideas that are not extraordinary usually languish unfound – regardless of how much advertising or public relations that you do. Make sure you have a unique, remarkable offering and it will spread like wildfire online, if it’s truly unique and innovative.

2. Create LOTS of content

Once you have found an extraordinary service or product, you need to create lots (and lots) of quality content about it. There are many ways to distribute your content – social media accounts, blogs, article marketing, tweets, videos, podcasts. Great content about a great product or service will attract the links you need from other sites. These links generate traffic, which in turn tells Google and every other search engine that YOU should be ranked more highly.

(Need some writing help to keep up with your publishing schedule or additional resources to help you distribute what you are creating? Contact us for your many cost-effective options!)

3. Optimize your content

All of your content should be “keyword optimized,” both for search engines like Google and also for users of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Flickr etc. who will be spreading it.

Be sure to include some of the most important keywords within the title (or Title Tag) of your piece so it will be easy for the engines to find and identify it. But you also need to make the titles enticing for human eyes as well, with a subject line that will elicit responses. Something that arouses the curiosity of readers such as” “Everything you need to know about…” or statements that can only be answered by reading all of the content, such as “How to”, “What can” or “Why do”.

Lists are very popular as well, like “10 things you must do on your website” or “5 easy steps to…” Provocative titles such as “7 things your bank doesn’t want you to know” or other even more sensationalized titles such as “5 financial decisions that could RUIN your retirement” or “8 Mistakes that cost you money, every month” also often work well.

People often respond as well to avoiding negative consequences as they do to potential positive outcomes.

4. Share your content

After you have created a remarkable piece of content and optimized it, now you need to spread the word. Email it to your E-Newsletter subscribers, post the content on your blog, tweet it to your followers, update your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile with it, then share it with article directories.

If your content is truly extraordinary, others will share it online for you. And as your content spreads, you will have more people subscribe to you or Follow you, so that the subsequent content you publish in the future will have an even greater audience.

5. Measure the results

If you cannot measure your results, you’ll never truly know which methods or channels work best for you. For example, you should compare your results for Google organic search (both branded and non-branded), Google paid, your E-Newsletter and Twitter feed, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media, Forum postings, and any of the myriad campaigns you could be conducting right now.

You should track visitors, leads and customers over time, for every campaign. Then increase resources spent on campaigns that are working, and discontinue or scale back the ones that aren’t.

How Important Is Bounce Rate As A Metric?

Bounce Rate, or the number of web visitors you have that visit just one page – the first one they land on, can be a vital metric to consider when current overall success and conversion rates of your organization’s site.

Bounce Rates can be especially important if:

– You have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site.

– Exploration of your site is important to your goals.

– You are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers.

– Yours is a retail site and you want people to shop around and make purchases.

– Your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content.

So what are some causes of a high Bounce Rate?

Your keywords and content could be mismatched. In cases where visitors are coming from search engines, a high bounce rate may mean that the keywords they used and the content they found when they arrived on your site aren’t aligned – so the page they landed on doesn’t meet their expectations in some way.

The best way to address this is to take the time to analyze your keyword traffic and make sure your pages are optimized for the keywords you want and that the content is closely aligned with keywords and not misleading in any way.

Another problem could be that the next step in your goal or conversion process is not obvious enough for visitors to follow. Look at your landing pages with a more critical eye and make sure the next step clear and easy to take. If it would typically take more than one more step to complete the conversion process, and visitors can’t find the necessary additional content they need for the decision making process, re-evaluate the navigation and see if there are ways to streamline or simplify. Also double-check for browser compatibility – perhaps the page is not displaying correctly under some conditions.

High Bounce Rates could also indicate your offer or product is not presented in a compelling or easy to understand way. Look at your sales copy or offer details and see if you can refresh it or make it more appealing. You could try split-testing different versions to see which performs better.

Another issue could be technical problems with your site. Particularly if your bounce rate suddenly spikes or displays an unusual trend, it could be an indication of technical issues, such as broken images or links, or something on the page not loading correctly.

In this case, check for compatibility and broken links. Test the load speed of the page and generally make sure your code is as clean and functional as possible. Check for server outages and other issues that could have temporarily affected the functionality of your site.

High Bounce Rates don’t always indicate a problem

If you have a blog homepage containing all your recent posts in their entirety, and many blogger sites are notorious for this. If all of your posts are presented up front, there is little reason for someone to click to any other pages. And if you have a loyal blog following, resulting in a higher proportion of returning visitors compared to new ones, your subscribers may just want to read the newest post and have no need to visit other pages. Blogs also typically have higher bounce rates compared to other types of sites so the same benchmarks do not apply.

If a landing page contains the call to action within it, such as submitting an email address, that single page can do its job effectively without requiring further clicks, and similarly a call to action or conversion that takes your visitor off-site – to an external shopping cart or email sign up, would look like a bounce without actually be so.

You should also realize that Bounce Rate is not the only metric that matters, so this data should not be analyzed in isolation. Look at the overall picture of your website and how it’s performing according to the metrics that matter to YOU. Take the time to distill exactly what you DO want your visitors to do when at site. And then ask if you’re making it easy for them to do that, and are you measuring it?

Look for trends and other data that give you a fuller picture of what the Bounce Rate really means:

– Is the bounce rate much higher or lower for certain keywords? If so, refocus the content on your site to address the better keywords.

– Does it vary according to how people found your site? If those that find your site via search engines are higher or lower vs. social media, for example, you once again know more about where to focus your energies going forward.

– How does it vary with New vs. Returning Visitors? As noted, Returning Visitors are less likely to take further steps with some sites (like blogs), and are expected to do the opposite on others (Bank or Credit Union site). Which of these types of sites is more applicable to you?

– Which particular pages or types of content on your site have higher or lower Bounce Rates? Spend more time on the style on content or pages that are producing for you.

– Especially important for a blog, looking not only at Bounce Rate but also at the length of time spent by individual visitors on the page can help indicate to you whether or not they are reading what they find once they arrive.

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