Having a clear content strategy will give your users a better experience as well as search engines. The result? a big conversion boost.
This is part 1 of a 6-part series on increasing sales through your website by improving its look and feel.
Have A Clear Content Strategy For a Big Boost
I’m going to assume that you are not a web expert, a psychology expert, an expert writer or an SEO guru. I’m also going to assume that whoever wrote your website text was also not an expert.
That’s a pity because as a result, you are losing business. The hard reality is that online is 24 hours a day.
While you’re reading this you’re losing business.
How To Increase Online Business With a Small Change
One of the easiest ways to increase your online business is to closely examine your website text and have a clear content strategy.
Communicating a message is just the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, there’s much more to it than just writing down the words/text on a page and showing it to your visitors.
We have to consider a visitor’s experience as well as the search engines experience when creating optimized text for a website. Satisfying all of these perfectly may not be possible, but you can do better than your current web text!
In this article, we’re going to look at some quick wins that can have a MASSIVE impact on your conversions!
Have you ever wondered how all those successful people are so productive? Well, we have an article for you covering 10 Habits to increase productivity. Don’t miss it!
Four Things To Note About Your Content Strategy
- Is it search engine friendly?
- Is there a strong call to action?
- Is it clearly laid out?
- Does it flow logically?
If you haven’t optimized your website text for the above four factors, it’s a fact that you’re losing business. a clear content strategy will greatly help this!
Improve your site’s conversion by optimizing your website text, always include a strong call to action!
What Is a Visitor’s First Impression?
Let’s start at the very beginning. The first impression that a website visitor will have of your website.
You’d be surprised but that first impression doesn’t even happen on your website!
It actually happens when a user inserts a search term in a search engine and your website is listed among all the other results that the search engine produces.
Let’s now take a look at the benefit of ‘Optimized Titles’ and why they are so important.
What we refer here to as titles are technically called ‘Meta Titles’ but they’re just the titles that users see in the search results.
I can tell you right now that if you have bad titles you are losing some SERIOUS traffic.
Is The First Impression Of Your Website This TERRIBLE?
This is so important I want you to really focus.
Does Your Website First Impression Look Like This?
Does your website look like this when people first see it?
With a messy title, ugly URL & description that just screams to your visitors,
DO NOT CLICK ON ME.
Or Does It Look Like This?
As you can see they’ve optimized their titles, URL & descriptions so that it looks like this:
That just grabs a user’s attention and gets them to your website.
How Do Bad Titles Lose Traffic?
I just did another quick search for ‘face cream lotion’ and I want to show you these results:
I want you to notice how using the correct term in the title and description, automatically makes it stand out from the other results and encourages people to visit your website.
You can have the best and most optimized website in the world but if you don’t have people visiting your site because your titles are not optimized you are losing traffic!
However, before you start optimizing your titles, you need a clear content strategy.
Without this, you’re just randomly choosing titles with no clear idea of how they fit into the larger content strategy.
Despite the website above being ranked no.2, I bet you MORE PEOPLE visit it because the title & description match what the user is looking for and it’s been BOLDED so when a user is deciding which result to click on, they’re drawn to this one.
How To Check Your Website’s Meta Titles
If you’re uncertain if you’ve optimized them why not perform a quick check? It’s very easy!
Just pop in ‘site:yourwebsite.com‘ (change yourwebsite.com with your actual website URL!) into Google.com and have a look at the various results.
While they don’t always appear exactly like you see them here, it’s a very close representation of what they look like for many of searches.
(It gets a bit technical about why they aren’t always shown as the same but let’s ensure you get the basics right!)
Like what you see? If so, great, I’m sure you can still optimize them better!
Hate what you see, now you know why people aren’t even clicking through to your website! You’ve got some urgent work to do then!
Then…Once They Visit….
Then when they visit your website, does your optimized content HOLD THEIR ATTENTION?
Did you know most people see your website page title long before they see your website?
Why Your Website Needs To Be Like Super Glue. It Needs To Stick Fast!
Hopefully, you’ve ensured that you have optimized titles to get people to actually visit your page.
Now that they are on your page, you have about 2s to KEEP them.
This is where a clear content strategy plays a big role.
What Do YOU Normally Do?
You open Google, type in your phrase, quickly scan the results, choose the most relevant one, and click on it.
You’ve searched the web before and have seen some of the nonsense, so you don’t fully trust this particular site to be the one to answer your question. You’re a skeptic at this point.
The jury is still out & you’re QUICKLY deciding if you’re going to stay & read more or return to Google and try it all again.
Does that sound about right?
Depending on how impatient your users are you’ve got 1 to 2s to convince them to stay.
That’s not long at all!
How Do You Hold Their Attention You Ask?
Having a good clear headline on your page.
They’re quickly scanning the page to see if it’s relevant and if they see what they’re looking for in a BIG title, they’ll stay.
So you see, the content strategy plays a role again. You’ll notice that I’m trying to help you have a clear content strategy that’s easy for your users to follow!
If they can’t see it, they’re out. Gone. Never to return.
Now it’s your turn. Have a look at your website’s main pages, and see if you can clearly see a website content title within 1 or 2 seconds that explains what the page is about.
Can you see a clear content strategy on your website? Can you see a clear content strategy on the individual pages?
If not, it’s time you optimized your website content titles!
Once a user lands on your site you’ve got about 2s to convince them to stay. Offer them value!
Go on, check out your website and see if it’s ‘sticky’ with great titles that encourage users to stay! If not, it’s really something you should fix.
How To Cut Your Losses On Your Website (3 Critical Factors)
We’ve talked a little about website text optimizations. Actually, we’ve just covered the 2 basics that have a massive impact!
There are a few factors and I’ve graded them for you.
Critical Factors For Your Website
- Does it have an optimised search result title (meta title)?
- Does it have an optimised URL?
- Does it have an optimised description?
- Does it have a clear heading in the content?
These Are BENEFICIAL:
- Does it have clear, prominent headings with your keyword in them?
- Does it encourage users to stay on your website?
- Does it have a strong call to action?
- Do you use keyword variations to catch the attention of visitors who may have used different search terms?
If you do not have the above sorted for EVERY PAGE of your site, you are losing visitors on those pages.
Which Pages To Focus Your Content Strategy Start On?
If you have a very large website with lots of pages, it’s best to start with your most visited pages for the biggest impact when rolling out your content strategy.
To find your most visited pages, head on over to your Google Analytics account and navigate to the ‘Top Landing Pages’ section.
Here you will see which pages are most popular with your visitors, and then start optimizing these first!
Your Next Step
If you feel that this is something you would like us to help you resolve, have a look at our
Website Content Optimization App
Depending on the size of your website, this process may take a while.
At the very least consider optimizing your most important pages:
- Home Page
- About Page
- Contact Page
- Services Page
- FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Page
That should have the maximum impact in the shortest amount of time.
What’s Next?
Read our next article in the website optimization series:
Use an Image Slider to Boost Visitor Engagement. Here’s how.
