One of the biggest problems marketers and business have is getting website traffic.
According to a recent study, 63% of marketers use website traffic as a top marketing metric.
Once you start to get traffic, however, there is another issue: conversion.
And conversion is a challenge because 96% of your websites visitors are not ready to buy.
Even with that in mind, you still want to convert those that are ready to buy, but many websites aren’t able to capture that 4% or even a fraction of that 4%.
To attract better visitors to your site and convert them to customers there are steps to take.
Main Website Pages
The first step is to improve your main website pages and that includes writing better content for these pages.
If you’re a B2B business you’ll likely have the following pages:
- Home
- About
- Contact
- Services
- Sub-Services (if you have more than one service)
There are others, but these are the mains pages.
Unfortunately, many website pages don’t have the right type of content to convert visitors into customers. The reason this happens is that the visitors are getting answers to the questions they ask during the sales process.
To write better content for your website pages, look at your website as a virtual salesperson. Give them the content they need to answer all the questions a visitor will have from when they first enter your website until they are ready to convert to a customer, which is usually done by them contacting you.
The Questions Potential Customers Ask
The first page where visitors start their interest in potentially buying from you is the homepage.
In real life, this is when the potential customer would ask a salesperson initial questions like:
What do you do?
What can you offer me?
How can you help me?
From here it surprises people, but potential customers actually ask about the company itself. This is where the person typically navigates to the About page to ask questions like:
Who are you and who works for your company?
Where are you located and what’s your history?
What are your values?
From here, if you’re doing well and the person is getting more interested, they’ll move to the homepage or directly to the Services page.
This is where they get the nitty gritty details about what you can do for them. It’s different for every business, but at this point people typically ask:
How does your service work?
What does it cost?
Can it be customized?
And many more questions. They’re getting into more detail about what your service is and how it works to help them.
Once they’re comfortable with the information and if they’re excited about the prospects they’ll finally ask the question:
How do we begin?
That’s when they move to your Contact page.
Content For Your Main Pages
Once you understand this process it becomes easier to create content for your main website pages.
Hopefully you’re already thinking about the questions your prospects ask and you know the information you need to include on the main pages of your website.
You’re giving those pages all the information you provide your sales staff. They go through this process in real life and your website will do that in the online world.
One final caveat is to use language your customers are comfortable with. Have your best salespeople review the content you put on the pages and ask if any of the language would be over the prospects’ heads. The salespeople will know.
If you’re the salesperson for your business then put your salesperson hat on and do the audit yourself. Or have someone that is not involved in the business review the content to see if they can understand what you offer, what it does for them, how it works and how they get started.
If there are any issues along the way you know where to focus and improve the content until you’re successful answering all the questions.
Blog Posts
A quick note on blog posts.
Your blog fits into your overall content strategy, but your blog needs to work to bring in people to your website that don’t know you exist and that don’t even know there is a service like yours out there.
With blog posts, you look to answer the questions your potential customers have in relation to the industry.
For example, a person might be thinking:
I am not up on the latest fashion. I want to be more stylish. I wonder what the new trends are this season?
You would write a blog post about the new trends for the upcoming season. The person sees that post on social media or on a search engine. They read the post and then clickthrough to your homepage where they see that you provide great apparel that is stylish. The visitor digs deeper and learns about how your apparel service works. They learn about you and your values and they contact you.
SEO
You might be wondering about how SEO fits into all this.
My feeling is that if you take the above approach with your main pages and with your blog that SEO will naturally take care of itself.
Your blog will attract people searching for general things, but for specific keywords. And over time as you get more traffic and a solid reputation in the industry your main pages will start to rank for terms that relate to the service you provide.
Using the example above, you want your blog posts to rank for things like “womens apparel trends” and your homepage to rank for “womens shirts”.
Conclusion
Hopefully this process will help you to create better content for your website and especially for the main pages. There is a lot of room for improvement on most websites.
And that’s the final point I want to make: your website is never “finished” in terms of the content. Always look at where you can improve and tweak the content on your website. It’s good to do an audit every quarter. Use the knowledge you gain about your customer and the interactions you’ve had to add new content and to remove content that’s not needed or that is confusing.
Setup that content audit schedule and start with the process above and you’ll be in great shape.
