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The Ugly Truth about Your Website and SEO

by Jennifer Beever

Paying for ongoing SEO services is a lot like going on a bad date. You heard that SEO is great and it works, you buy the service, but you don’t get the results that were promised. Why is that?

The real way to get results from your website is to have great content that visitors need or want. Just as certain rules apply to getting dates with quality people, rules apply to getting visitors to your site. How do you attract quality prospects to your site?

Don’t lie. Don’t get a visitor to your site based on black-hat SEO tactics such as stuffed keywords, keywords that aren’t relevant to what the visitor searched for, or other tricks to drive traffic. You won’t get a date. Your visitor leaves the site – called a “bounce” in the website analytics world.

Don’t hide the facts. If you’re not completely transparent about who you are and what you are offering, your visitor won’t stay long, probably will leave quickly, and probably will never come back. It’s kind of like using the 20-year old photo, (worse yet) modifying your photo on online dating, or claiming you weigh 30 pounds less than you are. You’ve gotta meet sometime, and then the ugly truth will come out. (See my previous post on this, 5 Reasons Your B2B Website Visitors Don’t Trust You.)

Do be interesting. No one wants to go on a date with someone boring, just as no one wants to land on a boring or irrelevant website.

Do give your prospect a choice of action. If someone landed on your site, hopefully there are a lot of things to do, such as download eBooks or whitepapers, subscribe to a newsletter, or register for a webinar. You just might get a chance at the next date.

Are you doing the right thing to attract the right customers online? Not sure? Contact us today – we do cost-effective, detailed website and online marketing audits for our clients.

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Best of B2B Marketing Zone for February 13, 2012 « Sales and Marketing Jobs
February 14, 2012 at 11:13 pm

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