Strategic Content Changes at Your Website

There are lots of reasons to make changes at your website, from changes in your business to a general desire to refresh and update your site. Sometimes, though, you plan site changes specifically for the sake of improving the bottom line:

• Increase focus on more profitable goods and services.
• Connect with a new segment of your target audience.
• Improve conversion rates.

We’re working right now with a client who wants to improve results with two specific groups of keywords. First, there is a service that is more profitable than the others the client offers, and he wants to increase the proportion of customers who choose this service. Second, there is a payment option that the client accepts which he knows is becoming less frequently accepted in his community. He figures he can bring in some additional revenue by letting people know that he accepts this payment option.

Here’s how we’ll accomplish this:

• First, we check on the keywords. The client has some in mind, but we’ll use Google Insights for Search, Google’s keyword suggestion tool or other keyword discovery tools, and the client’s analytics to identify those that have highest search volume and lowest competition. We also search with the likely terms to make sure that a search for these terms puts us in the right neighborhood where search is concerned (for more on this issue, see our case study of a London Girl Guides troop’s website).
• We add the best keywords to the content of the site. It’s essential to maintain natural English, and we’ll make sure to keep the text compatible with the design, watching the length and the placement of the text relative to images and design divisions. There’s no point in adding keywords if we’re reducing the quality of the text. Instead, we strive to improve the text as we enrich it with the most effective keywords. We also may change some terms which have turned out to be less valuable with the new terms we discover.  This is a live site refresh, which means that we make the changes directly, either with the site’s content management system or, as in this case, via FTP. There’s no downtime, and we don’t need to make design changes.
• We make sure there is a landing page for each search. We want people searching for the keywords we’ve identified to have a place to go that meets their needs. In the case of the site we’re working on now, there is a page for the service we want to feature, and there is a general page about payment options. We can fine-tune these pages to meet our needs. In other cases, we add specific new pages. People may reach these pages from our main navigation, but we also expect search engines to offer these pages directly to searchers.
• We examine analytics for more detail on visitor behavior. Since we have good landing pages for the searches we’re planning to capture, we can look and see what kinds of keywords are bringing visitors to these pages. We found that people reached the focus service page through searches for the kinds of keywords we expected. However, we also saw that some people were looking for providers of the service, while others were using search queries that suggested an earlier point in search: basic information gathering. These visitors tended to bounce away from the site very quickly. Apparently, we need more general information on that page to help people make their decisions.
• We add content for the visitors we see. Using what we learned from analytics, we added more detailed information for people at an earlier stage of the decision making process. We’ll check back and look for the changes in a couple of weeks; this will tell us whether we were correct in our assumptions, and also whether our content does its job.
• We support the new content with linkbuilding. In order to draw the search engines’ attention to our useful new content, as well as to help direct people who need the service we’re writing about to our client’s site, we’ll conduct a linkbuilding campaign for the new keywords. In this particular case, I wrote a magazine article on the subject using the client as a source. We linked out to the article from the site, helping both our human visitors and search engines to identify the client as an expert on the subject.

We can expect an increase in business for this client — business of the particular kind he wants. We can also expect to gain for him the normal benefits of fresh content: increased traffic and improved search results.

I hope that, after reading this, you will see immediately how it relates to your company’s website and find it useful in your business. If not, we’ll be happy to help you plan a strategy to make improvements in your business with your website. Call Rosie at 318.572.6002 for assistance.