You’ve built your website, sat back and watched it do its work.
After having some time to distance yourself from that development process–approving mock ups, cultivating copy, gathering images and getting that final product perfect–you’ve started asking yourself, “What should my website be doing besides just being ‘out there?'”
From our inbound marketing perspective, yes, a website is a place for your target audiences and the public in general to discover information about your organization. A website should do a lot more than that, however, when it comes to several important, active duties including:
- Capturing who’s actually visiting your website
- Assisting any prospective buyer’s journey
- Helping your sale’s team to have qualified leads
When it comes to inbound marketing, websites are the centralized hub of digital marketing with many tactical spokes attached. They house digital marketing resources, portals for your social media marketing and information-gathering systems. In addition to integrating your digital marketing efforts into centralized campaigns, inbound marketing methodology has a lot to say about optimizing your website.
Here are four signs that your website needs inbound marketing tweaking and what those tweaks look like:
Your Organic Traffic is Stagnant or Non-Existent
Has your organic traffic been stunted, declining or non-existent since you’ve launched your website? If you’re hoping to attract new business then this can be a significant obstacle that you’ll need to overcome.
Staggered organic traffic isn’t random. It usually goes back to any number of factors in the complex search engine optimization (SEO) formula.
Inbound Marketing Tweak: An inbound marketing fix would first require a diagnosis. A specialist will be able to audit your website and figure out where the problem lies. Most likely it has to do with the following:
- Poor website structure
- Google penalties from developing mistakes and oversights
- Lack of optimized indexed pages (number of pages you have)
- Non-winnable SEO titles and keyword selections
Some of the active work to resolve these issues includes restructuring your coding, finding ways to resolve these Google penalties, optimizing your current pages and building more of them and finally researching winnable keywords that will attract your ideal customers.
You Have No Way of Capturing Visitor Information
You may be getting 10,000 unique visitors a month to your website, but you’re still not getting the full value of your website. We want to capture the information of these visitors.
Yes, some of these visitors may contact you to set up a consultation or buy a product by using the phone number or email address listed. The reality is that there are other visitors who are simply exploring and need additional nurturing in order to make it to a sales-ready mindset.
If you have no way of capturing their visitor information to take strides towards helping them to get sales ready then it’s time for some inbound marketing tweaking. When I say capturing information, I’m talking forms. The most common is the beloved favorite: “fill this out to contact us.” This captures name, email and a message.
Inbound Marketing Tweak: Inbound marketing moves far beyond the original “contact us” form mentality. It reshapes thinking and information gathering.
For instance, let’s say you offer a spec sheet on your product, a whitepage, eBook, video series or etc. If you don’t buffer these resources with a form then you’re missing out on significant information. Rather than give these away to anonymous visitors, require people to provide you with some introductory information (name, email, adjective that best describes what they do). What you’ll receive in exchange is some intel on who’s visiting and why they’re visiting.
The other bonus, is that if you’re deeper into the inbound marketing conversation, you can follow up with these individuals with lead-nurturing email work flows targeted at leading these visitors to a sales-ready state.
Visitors Are Bypassing Your Forms
Even if you’re using a variety of forms already to buffer your resources, another potential issue can emerge: your visitors are bypassing your forms.
This means they are either getting by without giving their full name, email or another item that you’ll need to learn why they’re visiting.
Inbound Marketing Tweak: The tweak here is fairly simple–check the way the forms are built. Are they preloading information that allows someone to just click the “submit/download button?”
Or did you set the form to require that information or is it optional? If it’s current set on optional for any field, go back and insure that the information is required to move forward.
You’re Not Utilizing a Blog
This is perhaps one of the most commonly underutilized parts of a website in today’s day and age.
Many businesses ask, “Why does the world care what I have to say on a blog?” That’s a good question.
The fact of the matter is this: a blog isn’t a place for your random laments about life and your industry. It should be a strategic space where you’re answering questions that your prospective customers have. Beyond that, it should answer these questions with search-engine-optimized titles and copy that help those prospective customers find you while searching for answers.
Your blog is your digital voice. What you say there says something to the world. Saying nothing? Well that definitely says something.
Inbound Marketing Tweak: The tweak here is simple–start blogging with an inbound perspective.
Through that, again, research the questions that your ideal customers are asking as they go through the buying process. With that knowledge and some search engine keyword research, the content creation process can begin to start attracting and educating new business.