The importance of a rule-compliant, content-rich website
Potential customers are going to pre-qualify a business by checking out its website. If there is no content related to their search queries, then they will never find it to start with!
Rule-Compliant & Content-Rich
Unfortunately, there is no rule book and content covers a multitude of requirements, so what do we mean by rule-compliant and content-rich?
- Rule compliance requires a deep understanding of the hundreds of elements Google uses to rank a site without them telling anyone specifically what those requirements are.
- Site Design:
- Responsive, mobile-friendly.
- Logical internal page links.
- Friendly for sight-impaired visitors.
- Content:
- Knowledgeable, authoritative, relatable, and understandable.
- Frequent updates.
- Well organized with a clear purpose.
Industry-Specific Content
Expertly written blog style, educational content directly related to popular industry-specific search queries.
- You must train yourself to think about your value proposition in terms of how potential customers may formulate their search terms.
- You must have content on your site that has been optimized for these search terms.
- 90% of all search queries are not related to a purchase. Instead, they are initiated for the purpose of gathering more information.
- Web traffic is distributed to the sites that provide the information researchers are looking for.
- Ultimately, the information providers are more likely to become the transaction providers when the buyer is ready to buy.
Visit-to-Lead Conversions
Deploying technology features designed to convert visits to leads via the capture of email addresses, underlies the whole purpose of a website and its 24/7 role.
- Combination of free and gated content that requires a form to access.
- Instant chat and bots.
- Discreet, user-friendly pop-ups.
- Relevant landing pages promoted to visitors who have told us they are interested in a topic.
Search Engine Optimization
There's a lot of ground to cover on a website before anyone can make a legitimate claim that it has been optimized for search.
- Meta descriptions and titles.
- Site map.
- Keywords and phrases.
- Integration with Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Console.
SEO is a dynamic topic - the playing field is constantly changing and what may work well today, may not work so well tomorrow.
Local Listings
There is a network of more than one hundred local listing directory sites where your company content must be represented consistently.
- Local listing site examples such as Yellow Pages, Yelp, Yext, and many more.
- But they also include:
- Google My Business
- Bing
- These are important "micro-sites" that must be managed before they can become a significant source of traffic.
You cannot fully optimize your online presence if you haven't paid attention to your local listings.
Analytics
Understanding your traffic sources and what's working and what isn't is critical for improving performance over time.
- There are 5 main sources of "free" traffic - Direct, Organic, Social, Email, and Referred.
- A traffic development plan is just as important as a financial operating plan.
- You must monitor your traffic against that plan.
- Establish goals for visit-to-lead conversions and lead-to-customer conversions.
- For a website to do its job, it must be presented in a way that enables it to perform as a 24/7 lead generator.