Website Design

26 Jul

Content Marketing for SEO

By Ken Arp

Content Marketing for SEO refers to having an ongoing plan to continually add more pages of content to a website in order to increase search traffic over time. It is a strategy that will benefit the overall search rankings of a website in a number of ways.

1. By adding more pages to a website it will gain respect from the search engines. Sites with more pages (typically over 100) are viewed as authority sites and given better ranking for searches.

2. Adding fresh content on a regular basis will also improve the overall SEO of a content marketingwebsite. The search engines love fresh content and if your website is continually adding more content it will rank higher than a site that remains stagnant or a long period of time.

3. The more pages that a website has, the more keywords that it can be targeting. As I written about previously, 35% of searches today are made up of 4 or more words and that trend is only going to increase. People are getting more defined in their searches and this opens up the opportunity to optimize for these longer keyword phrases. It also opens up the possibility of targeting timely search phrases based on current events.

For many companies the biggest road block to this type of strategy is coming up with new things to write about. We’ve developed a few different ways to help with this depending on the type of business and the level of involvement they want to have. There are some businesses that have a level of expertise required in their content only they can provide, but we can still assist them by providing them with a “content blueprint” to guide them. In other cases we can research and write effective content on their behalf without client involvement.

In today’s world of internet marketing content is still king. Content marketing can be a cornerstone to an effective internet marketing plan.

04 Jun

How To Turn Website Traffic Into Business

By Ken Arp

Often times I find that all of the focus in internet marketing is on getting traffic to websites and not enough time is spent on how to turn website traffic into business. The fact is, the vast majority of website today are not effectively built to do it well. A big reason for this is that companies often will have a graphic designer, in house staff member, family member or friend design the website and not someone that is well versed in internet marketing. The end result can be a very pretty website that they think is wonderful, the problem is that it was not built with “Conversion Architecture” in mind.

“Conversion Architecture” is a term that was coined years ago by WSI and it refers to the art of designing websites that are built to convert website visitors into actual prospects. There are many aspects to this, far more than we can cover here. Some of the general areas of concern include content, positioning, calls to action, colour schemes, navigation and more. Even professional marketing companies that don’t specialize in internet marketing are guilty of building websites that lack quality Conversion Architecture.

So how big of a difference can it make? Let me give you a scenario with real figures to explain. A client has a website and the average sale is worth $750 with a 20% margin for a profit of $150 per sale. Historically they averaged 1,000 visitors to their website per month with 5% of them inquiring and becoming a prospect (50 prospects) from which 20% convert into customers (10 customers). Their website generated $7,500 in revenue per month with a profit $1,500 per month. By incorporating effective conversion architecture they were able to increase the number of visitors that inquired and became a prospect from 1 out of 20 (5%) to 3 out of 20 (15%). That change alone tripled their revenues to $22,500 and profits to $4,500 per month.

In many cases the most cost effective way to increase revenue for your business isn’t to get more traffic, it’s to focus on how to turn the traffic that you have into business. You are welcome to contact me for more information on conversion architecture.