#40 - Online Marketing Essentials Part III: Key Pages, Messages & SEO

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We’ve cracked 40 podcasts! Today’s episode is rounding off our website essentials series for online marketing and we will take a look at;

Key Pages
Messages
SEO
Measuring Traffic

What have Andrew & Heather Learnt This Week?

Andrew has been looking at Google Trends which has been merged with Insights in the last year. They have introduced ‘Top Charts’ which is an interesting look at the most trending topics; e.g. top charts of business people, celebrities etc. There is a huge range of top charts available, even countries and cocktails! You could embed Google Trends on your website and set it according to whatever your niche is.

Heather learnt a simple trick about lighting for webcams, video cameras or smart phones. There are inexpensive lighting kits (Google search “continuous lighting”) that you can easily set up in your home or wherever you need to shoot. You could use them if you use Google Hangouts or any other live recording for video marketing to improve the light while you record.

Key Pages

What are the key pages you should have on your website? These will be displayed on your main navigation bar. The home page is of course there, but did you know the ‘About’ page is one of the most highly-trafficked pages on most websites? Many people often seem to do this as an afterthought but given the traffic it attracts it is a good idea to spend time on it! When setting it up, you should have the benefits to the user above the fold (above the point where people need to scroll down). The next part would be any social proof such as statistics or people you have helped. Put any biographical information right down at the bottom – from a visitor’s point of view this is the least important part.

The next key page is whatever it is that you sell; e.g. ‘signature program’ or ‘my products’. After that should be your blog or articles and lastly should be your contact page. This will give you a nice clean main menu – you can always have other pages which you direct people to via social media or links off other pages.

Messages

What is the main message you want your site to deliver? Generally you want visitors to convert to a lead or sale so the whole thing should be designed to encourage people to take the next step with you. For example, you should have prominent buttons on your site that easily show people where to go next such as; “book now” or “sign up here”. Keep it very simple for people to get to the point where they take that step with you.

SEO

There are two types; onsite and off-site. SEO is basically about creating very good content consistently over time and naming it the right things. What we mean by that is to use wording that people may be searching for on search engines. Think about the sorts of questions that people would be asking about the content you deliver. Multi-media is a great idea because it keeps people on your site longer which helps you to rank higher on search engines. Don’t worry about social bookmarking or back-linking anymore – these are now out-dated techniques. Just focus on creating good content!

Measure Traffic

All you need to do this is something as simple as a plugin for Google Analytics. We use one called Yoast for WordPress and it allows you to measure traffic as well as see what keywords people are searching and where they are coming from. Google Analytics is great because it is free. If you don’t track your traffic you will have no idea how you are positioned and whether your website it performing or not!

Fiverr Gig of The Week:

You can get Google Analytics added to your site by someone from Fiverr for $5! Here is one we found;