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B2B sales cycle: adjust SEO copywriting to meet prospects where they are.

July 12th, 2011 by Kelly

SEO copywriting: how can you write content that will capture the attention of prospects in all stages of the B2B sales cycle?

Great question! The first step is amazing low tech – and that’s to put yourself in the mindset of prospects and think about the mental process that they might go through. Make sense? Let’s walk through an example.

Let’s say that you own a company that offers a wide range of accounting-related products:

  • Directly offering accounting services, ranging from bookkeeping to tax preparation to sending experts to relevant court cases
  • Providing in-house accounting training to help businesses set up the processes they need to ensure quality control
  • Selling accounting software packages for multiple industries

Now, envision routes the B2B sales cycle can take –then use a professional keyword research tool to see how people search for those products and services.

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Online conversion audit: boost web site usability for increased sales & ROI.

April 12th, 2010 by Leslie

Online conversion audit: after (or even before!) you’ve successfully increased targeted traffic, discover how to get prospects to say “yes.”

Perhaps your company has been focusing so much on boosting targeted traffic that you haven’t given much thought about what your prospects will experience once they arrive at your site. If so, don’t beat yourself up about it; it’s not uncommon.

But . . . you will want to remedy that, as soon as possible, to ensure that prospects that do arrive at your site quickly and easily find the information they need to make a buying decision so that they order from you – and NOT from your competitors.

Here are steps that you should take when conducting your online conversion audit:

Online conversions, tip # 1: Make sure that your site is quick to load.

According to Akamai Technologies:

  • On average, people are only willing to wait two seconds before they start to become impatient with load time.
  • Even more alarming, 40% of shoppers are willing to allot only 3 seconds for load time before they click off your site (and then probably choose one of your competitors).
  • Quick load time is needed to build customer loyalty, according to the same study, especially for high spending customers.
  • Seventy-nine percent of online shoppers who suffer from a dissatisfying shopping experience are less likely to return to that same site to make a future purchase.
  • Twenty-seven percent of shoppers won’t even go into a physical store if they had a bad shopping experience with that store’s site.

So, if your site doesn’t load quickly enough, then it doesn’t matter how wonderful your products and/or services are, or how well you’ve explained the benefits of them. Your prospects are already gone – possibly for good!

If you need a second reason to speed up your load time, here it is. Google has recently announced that site load time is now part of their algorithm. This means that sites that take longer to load will potentially rank lower in the search results than faster sites. If you’re lower in search rankings, your company will be harder to find – and, if prospects can’t find your site, you’ve lost out on a whole lot of conversions and sales.

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