Welcome to the Escape Blog

Does your business have a website so that you can burn up your marketing budget to get rid of it? I hope not, but if you do have spare marketing cash, feel free to throw it my way!

The reason I ask is that I get the impression that clients almost don’t believe that they should expect sales leads, sign ups, etc. from a new website or a rebuild. Perhaps this is their experience talking, perpetuated by a relatively poor performing website in the past, I’m not sure, but I certainly don’t agree.

In fact, I can’t actually understand why return on investment on a marketing website shouldn’t be a necessity for any business. Many lazy marketers get around this by suggesting that their website is purely for ‘brand awareness’. Yeh, right.

Time and time again at The Escape, we have created websites that do actually deliver tangible results, so I know it is a realistic expectation with the right resources and focus.

So, how do you end up with a website that delivers results? Well, you start from the back…

Website KPIs

Firstly, you have to decide what you actually want from your website, or to be more precise - an interaction with an interested visitor to your website. These goals are sometimes called website key performance indicators and are the measurement for your website success.

An important factor when thinking about what you can expect is that you probably aren’t actually selling the sale. If you focus your end goal on what you can reasonable expect, rather than going for the improbable ‘buy now’, you will have a much better chance of starting the sales process. This may be a contact, sign-up, or e-mail enquiry form.

Driving your own traffic

Search engine marketing tends to focus on driving traffic to your website, but what about when it get’s there? Far too many websites are still too passive, expecting the user to blindly do all the hard work.

Many people I speak to in early stages of a web project think that they can mind-read what a visitor will do when they get to their website but unfortunately a website doesn’t have a beginning, an end or indeed a logical path.

Firstly, every visitor is different and will scoot around your site the way they want to. Secondly, if your web site is optimised, the chances are the visitor won’t actually land on your home page. They should be directed straight to the most relevant page on your website.

So, many badly-planned websites end up being home-page centric with no clear paths, when what you really want is a clearly sign-posted experience that ends up at your website goal no matter where the user lands.

You have already defined your KPI (what you want to happen), so why not drive traffic in that direction using call-to-actions? Call-to-actions are signpost graphics or statement that basically say, “right, you’ve done with this page, you’re still interested, why not do this next?”

Relevant content for your target market

Continuing working backwards, you need to get relevant visitors in the first place. Writing relevant content that gets spidered by search engines is only part of the story. Your website copywriting needs to engage a real life human being as well. This means using the right words for your audience.

Too many website still use industry jargon and marketing BS, with “bespoke” this and integrated solutions, etc.; words that are so vague they could apply to any industry.

Does your website, and more importantly the individual web pages, actually say what you are selling?

Keywords are words that you can use in your website content that may also match a set of words that someone may type into a search engine. Notice how vague I was there. You cannot guarantee what someone will type into a search engine. Tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool give you an insight and do help, but it is not an exact science.

Focus on delivering content that covers the basics. If you sell spanners in Basingstoke, you need to mention spanners, and Basingstoke. Perhaps you could also mentioned types of spanners and get real specific.

Focus

Using words that people may search for in your content is a step in the right direction, ie. answering their query.

I actually believe the basics of SEO and website performance are quite simple (I even wrote a free SEO e-book about it). Unfortunately, too many businesses try to be too many things to too many people and dilute their sales offering.

If you get focused on your sales message and “give ‘em what they want”, you will not only get more web traffic, but real sales leads…