In part 1 of this series in our last edition, we talked about how your marketing strategy integrates with graphic and web design to express your company’s differentiated value. In the digital world, your website is your storefront — your No. 1 tool — where your prospects browse and discover all the benefits of your products and/or services and where you generate leads and purchases. We learned that the most successful websites draw people in with a user-friendly, memorable design that highlights your value proposition and establishes your credibility by speaking to your readers with targeted content.
But how do you know you are doing that successfully? This article will focus on strategic website management tactics that help you understand if your web content and usability resonate with your site visitors. We will highlight best practices for using your website to maximize leads and drive sales, give you tips for effective search engine optimization and underscore the role website analytics have in getting it right.
Showcase Your Juiciest Content
Your content drives your traffic. The right content strategy offers essential messages for attracting your target audience to your website. Deploy it in your outbound tactics like emails, advertisements and social media to capture attention and encourage your readers to inquire for more information.
Once visitors are on your site, tell them a story that is persuasive and actionable. Your goal should be to help your prospects move through your site in a logical manner, answering their questions and intriguing them as they consume your information. From white papers to webinars, your content is your biggest opportunity for lead generation. The key is to present the right calls-to-action (CTAs) at the right time so that your prospects continue to move forward in the process until they request a one-on-one conversation with your sales team.
Advice for Great Content
Keep it short, succinct and client-focused.
Define your key audience and tailor your content to them. The most successful content speaks directly to your audience and addresses these questions:
- What is their biggest challenge?
- How do your services or solutions solve that challenge?
Stock Your Shelves for SEO
Your search engine ranking has a large impact on traffic to your site. When potential clients search for solutions on the web, you need your site to rank above your competitors’ sites. Remaining in the top five search results for keywords pertaining to your business is a good goal to have. In our highly competitive life sciences industry, the science of search engine optimization (SEO) is critical, complex and ever-changing. However, there are best practices to improve your rank:
- Perform a keyword analysis, identify shared keywords and seek out non-branded keywords that relate to your services (i.e., keywords that don’t contain your company name)
- Monitor competitors’ SEO over time to help you gauge your own SEO growth
- Update your website with new content to remain relevant in search and augment content and landing pages with high-value keywords
- Identify reputable traffic sources referring to your website and create an inbound links strategy
- Optimize your site’s meta descriptions to improve SEO and click-thrus
Be a Good Manager
To maximize your site’s performance, review your website’s analytics regularly and adjust your approach, including your content, CTAs, layout and design based on what you see. Using Google Analytics to track visitor behavior is a great start. By placing a few lines of code on your site, you can begin to understand how your users find and interact with your content. Additional opportunities for growth can be identified using other third-party providers that track scrolling behaviors.
Maximizing this information, however, is a process. You will need to set up your reporting to reflect your business/sales goals and objectives, review the information regularly — we recommend doing so monthly — for what works and what doesn’t, then make changes to your underlying strategies as necessary. The task can seem daunting, but it can have a large impact on the overall success of your website.
Your website is one of your most powerful sources for managing your buyer’s journey and turning leads, but it is only successful if you continually refresh and replenish your content and tactics.
If getting started sounds overwhelming or if you need an extra hand creating content or optimizing your site and analytics tools, we can help! SCORR has a team of digital, web and content experts who can make each of these components work together to maximize your prospect’s journey from lead capture to conversion. Get started with our free website health check.