These days, having a website is a crucial part of having a business.  The age of inbound marketing has come by storm, so having your website easily accessible by consumers is key.  However, you cannot create a website and expect it to rank atop Google or generate meaningful traffic on its own. In this article we will talk about how to create a helpful and productive website to help you gain more traffic and how to capture that traffic.

What Is The Awareness Stage?

The awareness stage is part of HubSpot’s 3 stage buyer’s journey for inbound marketing.  The 3 stages include, awareness stage content, consideration stage content, and decision stage content.  Being the first stage in the buyer’s journey, the goal of the awareness stage is to have meaningful and helpful content easily accessible for the consumer when they realize they have a problem.  To know who to target you need to fully understand your buyer persona as well as your other buyer’s journey stages.

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Source: HubSpot Buyer’s Journey

Top Five Things It Should Do

  1. Attract Customers

    Attracting customers should be your overall goal when creating a website.  SEO, or search engine optimization, is a great tool to make sure your website is easily accessible to your customers.  Google ranks websites based on SEO keywords and relevancy of content, so optimizing your web pages will make it easier for someone to find your company.  According to internationally known SEO guru, Neil Patel, 67% of all clicks are from the top five results and three out of every four searches start on Google.  You can help your SEO ranking by creating:

    • Blogs
    • Meta keywords
    • Content, content, content!
         

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  2. Improve Sales

    Not long after attracting customers comes leads, and hopefully sales.  On your website you should add ways to gather emails to make it easier to define leads.  Siimon Reynolds from Forbes explains that the best way to capture emails is to offer something of value.  You can offer techniques such as:

  3. Easy to Navigate

    Have a clear, precise path from the moment someone enters your website to your product or service.  According to HubSpot, 55% of visitors will spend less than 15 seconds on your website.  That is more than half of your overall traffic. If your website is a puzzle to navigate expect low conversion rates.
           

  4. Have Calls To Action

    A call to action (CTA) is a button, usually “Sign Up” or “Buy Now”, added into the website that will take the customer to another web page to take further action.  A strong and compelling CTA can gather leads and critical contact information to help identify potential customers.  CTA’s should also be placed on most pages in convenient locations.  Many websites contain these buttons on the top of every page to make it easy for the customer to find and fill out.
     
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  5. Track Business Progress

    One of the most helpful things a website can do for your business is to provide real time web analytics.  These can be very helpful because you will be able to see what is popular and what you need to work on.  Based on the goals you want your website to achieve you should create objectives, which should help outline what it takes to achieve your goals.  After creating your objectives, you can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success or failures of your initial website objectives.  Some KPIs include website search click-through rates or search visits to your website based on keywords.

Now That You’re A Website Expert

Creating a well-rounded website doesn’t have to be rocket science.  Adding these tips into your website will help your overall traffic and company.

Optimize your best content.

Focus on what you would want to see if you were a customer going to your website for the first time, and how you could make that experience easier and more helpful.

Add email captures to narrow down potential leads.

Finally, use analytics to constantly improve your websites accessibility and traffic.