If you read my plan yesterday for how to invest in your website over the next twelve months, you’ll want to know what you’ll get from expanding the content on your website. Here are some of the outcomes.
Your company will look so much better. Have you ever looked at your company website through the eyes of a prospect who doesn’t really know you? Is there really anything there which suggests they should give you a call, other than the normal marketing waffle about your complete holistic multi-dimensional systems capability and your customer-focused outward-facing philosophy? A list of products isn’t much of an incentive. They can get products from that big catalogue company, and they know what the products will cost, and be confident they’ll arrive in the morning. You know how much more you can bring to the table, but does your website demonstrate that you know your stuff? Once you’ve got questions and answers on the website, it shouts: “We’re knowledgeable, we’re involved in the market, and we’re going to make sure you get the right product for the job”. (Unlike, presumably, that catalogue company).
You’ll start getting more visitors to your website. More content means more chance of being found in the search engines, automatically. But useful content, which answers questions other people don’t want to answer, gets links from other websites. And more links means more visitors, both directly from that site, and through improved ranking in the search engines. This really does work, slowly and steadily.
You’ll start getting more genuine prospects to your website. More visitors are no good if they’re not the right visitors, but they will be, because they’ll find you from search engines where they’ve been researching a question and where your site was suggested as having the answer. “How do I do this?” “What does this mean?” “What’s happening with this legislation?” If you’ve got the answers, they’ll instantly be interested in what else you’ve got to say and to offer.
You’re building a cumulative marketing asset. You know that half-page advert you just placed in a magazine? Some people will see it when it arrives on their desks. And within days, it’ll be history. Just like that trade show, once it’s over. But content on a website just quietly sits there, working away, forever. I can show you articles I put on the web in 1997 which are getting more visitors 14 years later than they did when they were first published.
You can push it out to prospects as well as pull them in. “Did you find this article useful? Join our free mailing list and we’ll send you something similar every week.” Get that part right and you can build a circulation of hundreds of prospects who perhaps might not want your products now, but will be hearing from you regularly when the time comes that they can make use of your services.
If you’ve found the last three days’ articles useful and would like them as a single PDF document, here it is:
Schedule investment in your website: it’s the only way