Is Your Site Ready for SEO?
Is Your Website SEO Ready?
Your website has one goal—attract and convert customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps drive organic traffic to your website.
Once a potential customer arrives on your website, you need to be ready to meet their expectations from the query.
Clearly answer the query question
Explain how your business solves their problem
Facilitate answering further questions
Give examples of how your business product or service helped others
Provide a one-click ordering solution
If your competition makes it clear and easy and you don’t, you’ve lost the search battle.
SEO is a powerful technique to raise awareness for your business, but your website must be ready to make it easy to understand your business and conduct transactions.
How you present information about your business facilitates building trust and authority for clients and customers. Creating content in today’s search environment requires a strategy of knowing questions potential customers have, knowing their needs, and answering those questions with clear information.
Your website needs to be visitor ready.
Know Your Website Goals
Having a website isn’t enough. Your website needs to deliver a clear message about your business and be easy for a site visitor to navigate.
Avoid distractions like flashing banners on the homepage. Make each page focused on one topic. Guide your potential customer to easy purchasing options.
20 Questions to Ask For Website Readiness
What does your company do? On any page, connect your potential customer with clear information about your business. Making them search...somewhere on the site...for basic information will send them to a competitor.
Who do you do it for? Your potential client needs to know right away that your business meets their needs.
What are all the different ways visitors can contact you? Don’t be mysterious. Supply not just your contact information like a phone number and email address, but state your preferred method of contact.
List hours of operation, time zone (PST, EST) and days closed. Unless you are always open for business, tell your customer when you are available.
What are the needs your business satisfies for your customers?
Do you have a brick and mortar or other off-web locations or contact point?
How do your business and products benefit your target audience? Specify a clear list of bullet items of benefits.
What can your business offer your visitors, what’s in it for them, how can you help them? What problems do your prospects have that your business solves?
List features of your products and/or services? Specify a clear list of bullet items. Features are great, but stress the benefits your customers gain.
Write a 25 word description of your business to be displayed and used in search engine submissions.
Write a 50 word description of your business to be displayed and used in search engine submissions.
Do you have a business slogan, tagline, or catchphrase? Use it in your website header, and your homepage.
Give reasons why your business clearly beats the competition? What is your USP (unique selling proposition)? Customers tend to look for information as a priority over shopping on-line. They may surf at other sites, but they will continually return to the sites they trust intuitively and can solve their problems. A visitor may need to return many times before making a purchase (studies suggest as many as 5 times). What can you do to encourage customers to purchase now and abandon the need to continue to search?
List some of your competitors’ website URLs.
List any problems experienced with your existing website. List the major purposes for the website, the reasons for building one (in order of importance, i.e. name branding, e-commerce, because that’s what everyone else is doing, etc.)
Describe your vision for this site?
What are the specific short-term goals for the website (in the first 1 to 6 months, reduce customer service workload by X%, generate X volume in sales)?
List specific long-term goals for the website (in the first 1 to 3 years).
Within 3 years, we hope to: Define the criteria you will use to determine the website’s success (i.e. Internet orders of a certain volume, website traffic of a certain volume (this should not be used as the sole definition of success), X amount of sales as a percentage of hits, decrease in customer service costs, increase in productivity). There should be a track-able method to determine success.
What process will be used to integrate the website into the business on a daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. Who will manage each aspect of the website once it is complete (i.e. e-mail management, system maintenance, new content, testing forms periodically, marketing, etc.)?
List audience demographics – who you want to reach and how this will be accomplished. Be as specific as possible (age range, profession, interests, etc.).
Are you a local, regional, national or international business? What areas do you want to specifically target?
Know What You Want to Say
Simple, clear, and customer friendly will connect your visitor. Clear focus and simple navigation will reward responses to search engine optimization efforts. When you are clear about your offer and the benefits your website is ready for a technical SEO boost.
If you need help creating content or just thinking through your website, get in touch.
Photo byDaniel Cañibano onUnsplash
