Search Consulting Service Blog

I often get asked: How do I turn a website visitor into a paying customer?  I believe the question might be better framed as: How do I get customers/clients to visit our website? You will always get visitors who have no intention of buying your goods or services. The trick may not be to change these visitors into customers but to find more potential customers. To find a customer, consider offering them something they want, but that is not necessarily your product. And two, develop a relationship with them.

Often people don’t purchase from the low cost provider. Sometimes they don’t buy from the most convenient vendor. Instead customers often buy from the company that provides the best advise and has trained the buyer to be a discriminating buyers. This is true of the bike shop, the wine shop, or the consulting shop. On the web this advise is also called content.

The Web Offer

Follows is an example of offering a customer something they want that is not your product. I have a client who offers corporate strategic consulting services in a niche area. In order to differentiate potential clients visiting the website, from people interested in the service but not decision makers, we offered the potential client, a RFP template. No one but a potential customer would want this. But a potential customer will find a RFP very attractive. It could save them a lot of work trying to develop their own proposal. We also track who referred these RFP-interested visitors and then we altered the web advertising accordingly. The key is to think about who your customer is. In this case it wasn’t the CEO, it was the middle manager whose job it was to find potential consulting firms.

Developing Online Customer Relationships

There has been much written about developing online customer relationships. I believe that companies must become their industries thought-leaders. That is, they must become the “go-to” experts by providing quality content. Having a distribution mechanism like e-newsletters is critical. In fact, collecting email addresses on your website might be the single most important activity that you accomplish on your website. Often companies fail to place client-valuable content on their website like fact sheets, data sheets, old newsletters, and mixed media. A blog can also allow you to share your expertise, but this is a topic onto itself. Become the expert and the client relationship will follow.

Make News

The elements of a press release are fairly well established. PRLog has a good summary of these components.

I’d like to discuss the finer details of a press release - that is, what makes it interesting.

1) A captivating image or photo is critical. Images express so much that a  verbiage laden press release cannot.

2) A quote from a relevant person with an important sounding title adds credibility and readability to the release.

3) Finally we have the subject. The most captivating subjects deal with the humanity of the organization. Therefore a dry description of a new product might be a PR fizzle. Instead consider a volunteer effort that your company was involved in, some community outreach, or at a minimum something someone earned or accomplished. While I don’t totally understand it, animal-centric stories seem capture attention.

On-Line press releases provide an efficient method do gain organization exposure. And exposure often leads to increased traffic and revenue.

I usually assist my clients in deriving 10 or so keyword phrases. These are phrases that a prospect would  use to search Google and find my client. An example of a keyword phrase for a local bike store might be “Bend Oregon Bike Shop”. Now that you have these keywords what do you do with them? What we do with keywords is as important as finding the correct keywords.

Embed Keywords in your Website Content

Google and the other search engines analyze who your site is relevant to. The search engines want to ensure that they place the most relevant sites on the top of their search. Our job is to BE the most relevant. Don’t be coy. Use your keywords throughout your text. In fact you want these keywords to represent between 2 and 10% of all the words you use on your site. It is best to keep them in the order you had for your phrase, but that is not as important is using them. Back to our bike shop example, including in the website, Smurf Bike Shop is the best in Bend, Oregon, is not quite as good as saying that Smurf is a Bend Oregon Bike Shop, but it is better than not saying it at all! Click here for my current favorite free keyword analyzer .

Methods for Embedding Keywords

One of the best methods for embedding keywords is to exchange pronouns with keywords. E.g., We Welcome You, could become Bend Oregon Bike Shop Welcomes You. Look for opportunities to add keywords in links, headings, and the verbiage that exists behind an image (alt tag).

Remember that while search engine rankings are important, customers are the MOST important. Do not try to force the wording on your website to meet the 2 to 10% goal at the expense of readability. However, with a little forethought, you can get both the right keyword “density” and good sounding prose. Repetition is important for both the technical aspects of search engines and for the readers. Using a different adjective or noun may not be in the best interest of your organization.

Click to view Small Business Internet Marketing: Design vs. Promotion presentation. This works best using MS Internet Explorer browser. You can view it as a slideshow by clicking “Slideshow” in the bottom right of the screen after you download. In the normal viewing mode, you will be able to view my speaker notes. Thank you and please feel free to leave a comment below.

Blog vs e-Newsletter, which should your business use? The quick answer is both. The purpose of both blogs and e-newsletters is to keep connected with your customers. By bringing customers into the fold, they feel like they are a valuable part of your business. Both communication devices are valuable to promoting your business and therefore increasing sales, but there are significant differences between the two methods.

An e-newsletter that you send to your customers, clients, and potential clients is a great monthly or quarterly device. Always stick to a schedule when sending an e-newsletter (but that’s a new topic and a future blog). The best part of a newsletter is that it shows up in your readers’ email box. They take action, hopefully by reading it, but the information is there in front of them. With a newsletter you can offer advise, sales items, coupons, event notification, and a complete litany of information to your email list.

A blog is typically shorter, and for the writer, easier to produce. You write more often so it can stay very current. The disadvantage is that it is up to your customers to decide when and if they are going to bookmark your blog and read it. But the interested and involved customer will do this, for you are offering them something they want - professional information, social information, or simply price discounts. For the more technically savvy there is RSS, i.e. the customer can automatically put your new blog information on their My Yahoo, etc. but this is pertinent to only a small percentage of customers. The big upside to using blogs is that you don’t need an email address, therefore the entirety of the web world can find your blog.

Putting it together. Send out your e-newsletter. Tell them about your blog and why they should read it. On the other side, make sure you have the capability of collecting email addresses on your blog site / web site with an offer to send an informative newsletter. This is a great way to collect email addresses of interested parties. Therefore blogs and e-newsletters work in tandem, so there are no versus, only compliments.

Sam Handelman, Owner of SCS

A good looking website catches people’s attention. More important is the information you provide on your website. Your home page is like the window to a retail store - if people find it inviting, they will come in and shop. This is your chance to tell your story, become the expert in your field. As a general rule there are four content blocks to a home page:

• • Your mission statement - what is it that you do. The customer wants to know what your purpose is.
• • Your target market - who are you trying to attract. Describe your customer. Customers want to know if you are focused on them.
• • Your value proposition - why are you better. Personally, I like testimonials to tout my strengths.
• • Finally, your call-to-action - what do you expect your customer to do next. Be reasonable be honest.

With these four categories, you can build a home page that has both form (design) and function (content). From here search engine optimization techniques can fine tune your message for easier catagorization by Google, Yahoo, etc.

Sam Handelman, Owner of Search Consulting Service