How To Drive Foot Traffic To Your Virtual Storefront
You’re looking at your analytics. Your bounce rate is high. Your ranking is low. Does it matter? Is your niche so specific, or your brand so established it speaks for itself? You know your business better than anyone. You write a blog post about every month or two. Good enough?
Let’s use a retail storefront as a model. Whether you’re in real estate or accounting, the same concept applies. You have great signage and a stunning window display to generate foot traffic through visibility and location. You merchandised every aisle to lure your customers further in and delivered an exceptional experience. A perfect example of brand awareness spread through immersion and word of mouth.
E-commerce isn’t that different. Take those principles and apply them to your online presence. Increasing your brand awareness through visibility, encouraging traffic, and delivering an exceptional experience generates word of mouth. Here’s how SEO content delivers just that.
Location Location LocatioN
How do you create content that finds its way to the right audience at the right time? It takes an understanding of the minds and personalities of Google’s bots. Those bots act like a bouncer to a club. The right combo of keywords and phrases will get you in the door. Does your content come across as natural? If not, that bouncer-bot will kick you out of line, denying entry. 75% of people don’t navigate past the first page in a search result. So being on page five of a search result is no different than being denied entry.
A single blog post every month or two isn’t going to change your ranking. After a while, you stop seeing that post, and it says nothing. Flash forward; after a little research you’ve discovered this is true and hired a professional writer to produce SEO blog content for you. They’re doing their job. A consumer plugs a question into their search engine. If everything lines up, all the keywords specific to that search deliver your blog to page one. They click on your blog. Reading on, they’re immersed in your brand without realizing it.
A well crafted article will prompt them to read on. They’ll learn the value of your industry, your brand, and the information provided positions you as a trusted source. Conversions are happening. When that blog post is a year old it’s still relevant. It lures them further into the rabbit hole of information, linking to other posts on your site. That pushes your site into prime real estate!
Hot Real Estate
A brick and mortar’s location is stuck in its place, but a strong online presence could be anywhere and everywhere. Excellent displays, merchandising, and signage increases foot traffic, and translates to word of mouth. That well crafted blog, with the right images, fonts and colors, compelling headlines, keywords, and anchor text are the equivalent to that store. Those stocked aisles of content reflect your brand. Having updated relevant content will generate brand immersion.
This requires keeping up on what content your audience is consuming right now. What trended prior will clue you in on what trends next. Tap into that demand before it’s mainstream. Anticipating trends and generating the right content to the right audience at the right time could establish your brand as a thought leader and influencer.
Navigator Versus Driver
You’re behind the wheel. You know where you’re going, but you’re not sure how to get there. That’s okay. Better to let someone else navigate than make a wrong turn. Give the general direction you want to go, and concentrate on the road. A content writer is both cartographer and navigator.
Once you’re positioned, your audience will rely on your brand as a trusted source. Saying, ‘buy this’, or ‘hire me’ is not enough. One cannot apply the title of thought leader to themselves. The title is given. If your content delivers, the reader will make up their own mind and see the value of your brand. That alone is worth more than a thousand words.