I don’t believe in gatekeeping.
Therefore, I’m sharing my top content strategy recommendations I make for small business. Entrepreneurs and solopreneurs who operate on a tight budget can utilize these tips to maximize marketing efforts. Step away from the social algorithms and invest your time in a digital asset you actually own – your website. These strategies have helped clients see bounce rates drop to as low as 1.5%.
Neurologically, our brains prefer making additions in order to solve a problem, which means we often overlook key opportunities to subtract or refine. Now apply this concept to an initiative at work and you can empathize how scope creep happens. This concept manifests as brands asking for marketing services and employees hitting deadlines without addressing the technical foundation which search engines are certainly tracking. A big part of SEO is offering a better user experience.
There is a time and place for SEM and ADs but I often see brands using it as a lifeline rather than a competitive edge. I want to help small business from burning budgets on timely content and costly website re-designs. It is possible to improve the overall quality of the website experience by making simple changes.
Go to the homepage of your website.
Examine with fresh eyes how much content is targeting a new audience versus supporting the one you already have.
This is a missed opportunity to cater to your current audience and increase WOM. Customer service greatly influences a brand’s reputation. On a big scale, Chewy is competing with this exact strategy.
- Can you make a landing page dedicated to current customers?
- Are their operations you can offer with forms?
- Do your service, department, or category pages offer support?
Now click the main pages in your navigation.
Does page content support the levels of trust a user would have?
The majority of users arrive at a website via an event or blog post that was promoted through marketing. However, the primary and secondary pages of a website’s navigation are usually next up in a user’s curiosity. Any one of those pages are now the front door to your brand. Analyze your page content and evaluate how it can be grouped in a way that communicates the building of trust. The objective is to create a page layout that addresses these five behaviors users take when browsing.
Browse to learn and act as if you:
- know your brand well
- are researching for value against competitors
- are browsing to learn about your brand
- heard of your brand and want an entry level engagement
- land there by accident and need a quick understanding
(Inspired by Nielsen Norman Group 5 Types of Shoppers)
SEO is in the event and news details.
Marketers are often focused on the quantity of events and posts rather than the quality of timely versus evergreen content.
The biggest visual change I guide brands through is how to communicate to users where learn and when to act. This kind of visual storytelling eliminates lightens the cognitive load because there is a human on the other end of the screen.
When it comes to calendar events a user lands there with the intent to explore the logistics to attend. You can create a page to describe a process, department, program, or series with any content that is carried from event to event. This will support every initiative we talked about so far.
The next article isn’t the only thing users want when entering in on a news page. This you chance to tie a topical subject to all the ways your brand relates.
Okay, let’s talk about conversion.
We all know e-commerce checkouts and forms need content to be as simple as possible for conversion.
However, thinking about the number of forms needed to report data properly has so much power because most Google Analytic tools report based on goals. The easiest way to set that up is by having a measurable destination for all the ways your audience can engage. The biggest mistake brands make is tossing a single contact form in their footer because it means the form is doing the heavy lifting for options. If contact forms are placed specifically on the pages established throughout this exercise then data insights are no longer about users and page views but rather about how a user behaves with various conversion funnels on your site.