Chicago – October 12, 2018
What does better look like?
It’s a tough question but the answer centers around an understanding of your customer. Business decisions (while partly your own personal preferences) really need to center around what your clients want — not just your personal likes. Many entrepreneurs have a vision as to what their “ideal” customer is. That vision needs to match reality. For businesses with a traditional retail footprint, the feedback is instantaneous. Sellers meet customers face-to-face and learn the customer’s likes and dislikes. They find their resistance points in making the sale. Fashion legend, Diane Von Furstenberg has mentioned this in numerous interviews. Early on in her career, meeting customers at trunk shows and in retails stores helped her to refine her business decisions. The experience of talking with her customers gave her ideas about how to best service her brand. When she relaunched her iconic brand in 1997, QVC gave her the forum to connect on a larger scale with rapid and immediate feedback. This feedback can be more difficult to get in the digital world. But it’s possible.
How do people find you?
What’s the awareness around your website or brand? After spending hours on imagery and building page after page of copy, businesses fail to drive customers to their website. There is no limit as to what people can put on the web. However, content that is relevant requires more editing. And the next step is that you must drive people to that content. Your brand’s survival depends on it! Metatags and Keywords (part of On-Page SEO) come in handy when describing to a search engine what your webpage is all about.
Do you have the right Keywords?
These are the simple words that people type into Google or other search engines that allow customers to find you. Using appropriate keywords for your website eliminates users that land on your page by accident. Viewers get to your website looking for Apples only to find Oranges because your keyword said “fruit”. Words that are not specific enough to help flow the traffic accurately can be frustrating for your customers and for you. The wrong keywords skew your search results inflating your hit number while diminishing your sell number. The important data gets harder to find.
Your customer’s sticking points
Once customers get to your site, knowing the path they take to navigate is a key to unlocking their interests. Where the customer goes to, where they land or where they start is just the beginning. How long they stay on a page and where they bounce to adds to your understanding of their needs. Knowing this information will help to focus your energy on what is important and stop wasting time and money on the irrelevant. These analytics help you target the content to users, so they don’t waste time. The goal is to become the “go-to” site for information and products your customers love without bouncing them through pages. There are many large websites with deeply rich content that has been extensively labored over… only to find viewers don’t click on them because the content is not relevant to their needs. More isn’t more. As retailer Marshall Field coined many years ago — “Just give the customer what they want.”
Do you find Metatags and Keywords to be effective for your customers to find your website? What kind of results are you seeing? Drop us a line at info@cagoinc.com – we would love to hear your thoughts.
