Web Site Content: How It Can Make or Break Your Traffic

Your web site content might be driving visitors away.

How?

If it's all about "you", your company, its products or services or how long you've been in business, you won't really attract website visitors who stay, much less return.

So what should your website content be about?

Information.

What kind of information, if not about your company and it's products or services?

Well, there's a place for that as well, but the first thing your visitors should see is the information they're looking for to determine exactly what they want to buy and if you're the one they want to buy it from.

Let's pretend you raise Morgan horses to sell. Telling your visitors that you've been doing this for twenty years won't impress them.

Telling them the history of the Morgan breed, its pros and cons, its usual temperament and trainability--that will bring website traffic to cheer for.

People are looking for information. They are not looking to buy immediately (or at least much more rarely than most sales people might think).

If I want to buy a vacuum, I first want to know which one is going to work on my floors (hardwood), which one is going to be easy to handle, which one will last longer than twelve months, and which one people I know recommend.

Aha! People I know will recommend things to me, and I often buy those things. Why? Because I trust them.

Gaining Your Visitors Trust

How do you help your website visitors get to know and trust you?

By giving your them lots of great (free) content, written in plain language as if you were sitting in a restaurant speaking to a friend. Your friends listen to your advice, don't they? So consider your website visitors more of your friends, people you love to help.

If you do that, they're more likely to listen to your advice and buy what you sell when they're ready.

But how do you know what information they're looking for, and how to you translate that to your web page content?

By researching keywords online.

Keywords Are Key

Keywords are single words or phrases people use to find what they want. If you type in "hottest chili peppers", that string of three words is a keyword, or key phrase. Your web page content for each page on your site should be linked to one topic, and mainly to one keyword. You can use a few more keywords on your page, as long as they are related to the main topic--the keyword--for that page.

Google has a great, free keyword search tool you can use to determine what your entire website topic should be and what keywords you should be using on your pages. Use this information to build a website right: one that brings visitors, brings them back and helps them want to buy from you.

Your homepage should not be a sales pitch for your company. It should be about the most-searched website topic that is closest to your business' aim. If you sell fifty kinds of pickles, your homepage should be about pickles in general. Your other pages would be about the specific flavors of pickles, as well as how to can your own, unusual pickles and such.

Don't be pushy. Even on your "sales" pages. Give your visitors good information--great web site content--and they will return.

Ultimately, that's what you want. Repeat website visitors are the ones who feel they know and trust you. The ones who will buy.

Get your website content right, and you've won out over 95% of the other websites out there.

Copyright 2011 by Henderson Mountain Ink, LLC