I was chatting to a friend who runs an eCommerce website, about the content marketing and local online marketing work at miamedia and she asked, “How do I get more customers to my site?”
“What content do you have going out each week? What’s your marketing strategy?” I asked.
She paused. Then said, “I don’t really have one.”
“What keywords are your product pages focusing on?”
“Whatever the product name is,” she responded.
“But how are potential customers meant to know what your product name is. They’re searching for products in general, and unless you’re Gucci, customers won’t be searching for your brand.”
And we see it all the time at miamedia in regards to inbound marketing. Small businesses get blinders on when it comes to their website. They focus on too many different things that amount to little or nothing rather than doing a few things right.
Local Business Marketing – Get Your Content Right
Sometimes a simple website audit shows the content on a business’ product and services pages focus on the wrong keywords. They look at it in terms of trying to reach the broadest market possible, trying to compete with companies that already have a strong grip on their industry. When in reality they need to do just the opposite. They need to target smaller audiences related to their location and their particular products.
If you’re an electrician servicing one or two suburbs, why waste time creating content for all of Sydney. Why not create your content for your specific suburbs? If you’re saying that it limits your potential customer base, think of it like this. If you target all of Sydney, you are competing with every other plumber in Sydney looking to be at the top of Google, which makes it harder to rank. And even if you did rank, the majority of the people coming to your site are in areas you don’t service anyway.
When your content focuses specifically on the suburbs you do service, the search volume may be lower, but you have a greater chances of ranking and the customers that find you will more likely convert into actual work. You won’t be wasting time handling calls that don’t get you any closer to real sales.
Don’t Mess Around with Google AdWords – Get It Done Right
A lot of businesses get told by marketing companies that AdWords or pay-per-click advertising is the fastest way to get more sales through search. And it is, unlike search engine optimisation you don’t have to wait for it to rank. AdWords Campaigns are instant and can be a great way to drive targeted, qualified leads to your site, but only if done right.
By done right, we mean by targeting the keywords that will draw in people who will actually buy from you. Not people looking for information based around your business, but people ready to buy your products or services.
Include negative keywords, these are the keywords that are related to your industry but get you no closer to your ideal customer. Negative keywords, save you from showing up in searches that waste clicks and waste your AdWords budget.
AdWords campaigns aren’t a set and forget marketing strategy, to get the best results they need to be tweaked constantly, working on different keywords, bid prices, landing page layouts and Ad copy. Split test your AdWords text to find what works best for your audience. Place your call to action in different places. Find out what gains you the best conversion rates and see if you can improve on it.
Improve Page Speed and User Experience
Once you get customers to your website you want to make sure that you make the right impression. If your website doesn’t load properly across desktop and mobile devices it will be a determining factor in how likely you are to convert. If they can’t easily view your website or it’s difficult to understand and navigate, the majority of people will exit your page without taking any further action.
The same goes for the load speed or page speed of your website. If they are having trouble getting your pages to load customers won’t bother to wait around. They’ll go to the next company in the search results.
If these don’t work properly it doesn’t give off an overly professional vibe. And if you can’t handle your website correctly it puts doubt into the mind of potential customers that your services or products aren’t up to par either.
Both, page speed and user experience are factors that search engines take into account when deciding to rank your pages. If your pages take extra time to load compared to other sites or the user experience is horrible, search engines will see your pages as less valuable and give you less priority.
To talk about improving your local business customer acquisition call 1300 642 633!