Marketing and Website Redesign: An Inbound Challenge
by Andrew Millar
We’ve all heard the talk about inbound marketing. About how it’s the latest and the greatest. Now the challenge is how to integrate it into your website redesign.
First of all we have to admit that a website without visitors (traffic) is like a politician with no audience. He may have the greatest ideas and the best prepared speech in the world but no one benefits from it unless they hear him. So we need to get traffic to your website and it needs to be interested in what you’ve got to say (or sell). According to Google’s new search engine optimization guidelines, Penguin 2.0, authentic representation of what you have to offer is the key to bringing searches to your site. This is where writing about what you know through a regularly published blog will build your presence as an authority in your field.
Okay, so you have folks visiting your website. Now how do you engage them? Enter the website redesign with inbound marketing in mind. You need to clue in the marketers that now is the time for their input. Blog pieces can be linked to calls-to-action (CAT’s) so that your site becomes a functional, lead generation machine. You want to consider this in the redesign in order to avoid attempting to make changes after the fact when the look and feel of a new site has already been established. Landing page creation and lead generation forms need to be included from the start of the process.
This is a good time to review old keywords, develop related long tail keywords, evaluate existing copy and reformulate it so that current ranking and placement aren’t sacrificed.
And, finally, while combining marketing and website redesign, the ultimate proof if success lies in the user’s experience: does he show increased interest in your product or services? You owe it to him to educate him along the way, to share usable content via your blog and to then offer more free content with attractive calls-to-action to develop trust and loyalty. This will improve your visitor-to-lead conversion rate and it sets the stage for a buying process. It requires researching your customers’ buying habits and formulating a streamlined buying process for them.