‘If you build it, they will come’, is an attitude that we hear quite often here at Bc when we talk to marketers about optimising their website for inbound marketing success. The myth that people will flock to your website the moment you publish your first blog post is stubbornly prevailing in the industry.
We hate to break it to you, but unless you have similar transcendental skills as Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, you will have to work a little harder to drive relevant traffic to your website and convert them to leads (and eventually sales). Here are Bc’s top tips for setting up your website for inbound marketing success.
Run your website on a CMS that’s easy to manage
When you’re looking to rebuild your website, it’s easy to feel a little bamboozled by the number of content management systems (CMS) available (and the commercial systems are quite good at showing off their features too, right?).
Quite often businesses decide to go with the CMS that seems the easiest in the product demo: only to find out in the implementation phase that nothing is quite as simple as promised.
The single most important factor that will determine the right CMS for your business is who will have to manage the content internally. Do you have a team of 5 marketers and a developer who can quickly turn around amends and implement A/B tests? Great! A complex system won’t be an issue for you. If you only have a team of one or two marketers though a simpler system with an intuitive WYSIWYG editor will always be the better and more cost-effective option.
Optimise your content for SEO
Just because you’re writing amazing blog posts, it still doesn’t mean that they will show up on the first page of Google results when people search for a certain term. You need to optimise your content for SEO to achieve good organic results.
While we are big advocates for writing for humans first and search engines second, here is a general thumb that will achieve better results for your content:
Your content will rank better if the exact focus keyword appears in:
- The url
- The blog title
- The first paragraph of your content
- The meta description
Be social
Enabling social sharing on your content pages and regularly sharing your content through social media platforms will significantly add to the reach of your website.
But your social media activity should not stop there. Ever been to a party where that annoying guy only talks about himself? Well, you don’t want to be that person on social media. It’s a simple equation: the more value you can add to others on social, the more referral traffic your activity will generate.
Include relevant CTAs and forms
Got great blog content, but not getting enough leads from it?
Might be time to review your website for relevant CTA’s and forms. Is it easy to subscribe to your newsletter from your blog? Have you tried including an offer next to a case study to move people along the buying cycle.
Adding and changing CTA’s on your website is an ongoing job. Over time you will gain valuable insights about what works and what doesn’t for your different buyer personas, boosting the conversion rate of your landing pages.
Anything to say?
Have you recently relaunched your website to enable content marketing? Did the relaunch have the desired impact? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Brand chemistry is a b2b marketing agency winning your customers' hearts and minds through inbound, brand, content, lead generation and digital strategy. Our marketing specialists achieve stellar results with the latest lead generation techniques.