So you’re at the top of Google, you’re number one, you’re the best! Woohoo, great job. It’s just a shame you’re not making any more money though, isn’t it? That’s the thing these days. I see it so many times – people spending ages (and a fair amount of cash too) making sure their site ranks brilliantly for their chosen keywords only to find that the horde of extra sales they were anticipating has never materialised. What’s going on? Where’s all that extra money you were promised? You see, the problem is that so many people seem to assume a direct and inexorable correlation between rank and income. If I didn’t know better I’d almost swear some people are close to believing that you get paid just for sitting at the top of the search results. You don’t. There is simply no point investing time and money trying to get your site up the search results if you don’t spend at least as much time and effort making sure that you think about converting sales, monetising your site and making it work. Look, if you have your site at the top of the results for a keyphrase that sees about a thousand visitors a day reaching your business, how many of those do you want to have handing over their credit card details to you? So what are you doing about it? Too many people think that those one thousand visitors will be awestruck by your insanely cool logo, blown away by your exciting animated banner, mightily impressed by your bright and colourful pictures and mesmerised by the great 3D buttons. Sadly, people are very unlikely to be impressed by any of these things. Okay, so stick a few hundred words of high quality, professionally written text on there. Great, that will certainly get the attention of the search engines, and will provide interesting information for those who are actively looking for just that – information, but what if they’re looking for products, or services? What if they’re just looking for a sales page? I’m frequently dazzled by the fact that so many websites seem to virtually hide their sales pages, contact pages and other means of extracting cold hard cash from visitors. By all means work hard to get your site noticed by the search engines and seen by people looking for what you have to offer. But don’t stop there! Make sure that you grab the attention of your visitors, that you give them a clear, bold reason to take action, make sure that you make it clear what action they should take, and make it clear how they should take that action! “Save yourself £500 a year on your home gas bill! Get a free brochure and order form now – just enter your email address in the box below.” You see that? A clear reason, a clear call to action, and a clear explanation of how to take that action.
Internet Marketing Consultant at WEBPRESENCE, providing cost-effective SEO and Social Media solutions for small businesses looking to increase their online visibility and boost lead generation.
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