I love potatoes.
And one of the delightful surprises each year in my garden is the discovery of potatoes I didn’t plant. See, each year there are a few spuds that didn’t make it into the harvest buckets. They sit in the earth all winter. And when spring arrives, they push through the softened soil to volunteer their tasty tubers.
This year I found Yukon Gold potatoes in my squash bed, Banana Fingerlings tucked in among my garlic and some beautiful large Kennebec’s thriving in the compost pile.
Websites harbor the same delightful surprises. Real solid mashed-potato meals for your business. Pure Yukon Gold. But too many businesses don’t look for them . . . don’t find them . . . Or don’t know what to do with them once they do find them.
As a natural health SEO copywriter, I find them all the time for my clients and help them put these untapped resources to good use.
Here’s what I mean.
The 3 Secret Treasures In Your Website You Don’t Know About
1. The High-Traffic Page Lost In the Archives
Just this summer I did a website content audit for a client. And lo and behold, when I looked through his analytics I found one page was getting thousands of hits each month. It was an article about fungal infections, one of this business’ specialties.
Despite the popularity of this page with his visitors, my client had forgotten that it existed. In fact, he couldn’t even find it using his website’s navigation.
Clearly he had a great landing page that was pulling in traffic. However, when I looked more closely, most of the visitors were leaving the page and his website after a short perusal of the page.
I realized based on the search terms it was ranking for that many of his visitors needed a little more confirmation that they had come to the right place for their search. We needed to tailor the content a little more, add a sidebar and make sure these new visitors stuck around a bit more.
And then we needed to artfully move them deeper into his website towards his sales pages.
His website is not alone. Most websites have terrific content that’s pulling in traffic but not being used effectively to convert that traffic into customers – or at least hot leads.
2. High ranking pages that aren’t converting to clicks
It was exciting to find this page bringing in all these visitors each month. But soon my excitement reached a fevered pitch when I looked even more closely at the data.
It was ranking #1, #2 and #12 for some very high-volume search terms. Using some raw estimations, if this page was ranking like this it should be pulling in close to 40,000 visitors each month.
It wasn’t.
So I looked at the search engine results page (SERP) for the different terms. This is the results page people see after they put in a search term with Google. It is the page that lists the different options Google has come up with.
His pages were up there, ranking well. But the title and description that appeared in the list of options Google brought up did nothing to intrigue searchers. I could tell right away that he was losing potential visitors right from the start, despite its stellar rankings. The people who had searched for one of the terms that brought up his page just weren’t being drawn to click on his website listing.
See, plenty of SEO’s do some meat market page title that just lists a few key words. Like “fungus| fungal infections| natural antifungals”.
Ho hum. If I’m looking for some help, I’m more likely to go for a title that says something like, “Got Fungus? Best Natural Antifungals For Fungal Infections”.
And then under the title I’d create an equally intriguing description that ends with a call to action, encouraging searchers to click through to his website.
Maybe something like, “Got that sneaking suspicion you’re battling a fungal infection? Use natural antifungals to beat fungus safely. Find out more . . .”
These two bits of copy, called metatags, are often overlooked by webmasters, put in as an insignificant afterthought. Some SEO’s belittle meta-descriptions as not such a big factor in ranking.
I beg to differ. When it comes to SEO, every bit helps in telling search engines the goods are on this page. And when it comes to searchers, if you can’t grab their attention and encourage them to come to your site on the search engine results page, why bother ranking?!
3. Hidden High Attraction Search Terms You’re Already Pulling With
This is a lesson I discovered on my own HealthyMarketingIdeas.com website. When I looked through my website analytics, I found out that many of my visitors were not potential health copywriting clients, but beginning health copywriters looking for information!
I found I was ranking well for terms related to health copywriting courses and resources.
Hmm. I’ve written an e-book on writing copy for nutritional supplements. And I’m an affiliate marketer for many tremendous health copywriting resources. I realized that if I publicized the same products I used to keep my business humming, I could get a nice affiliate commission as a result.
If I don’t create some pathways for this traffic to purchase things from my website, I’m missing out!
Not to mention I’m doing a disservice to these visitors who may be looking for recommendations to get their business going.
Based on this discovery, I’ve slowly been retuning my website to help these visitors out. And making some income from it on the side.
Tap Into Your Natural Health Website’s Hidden Treasure Chest
Your website could be loaded with gold, just hidden beneath the surface. However, you won’t know it if you don’t look for it.
This is why the data you collect on your website traffic is so important. It can help you recalibrate your marketing to capture potential customers you’ve been ignoring.
And then you can get to work . . . mining that treasure and growing your business. Sometimes it takes just a few tweaks. Often enough, this sleuthing can reveal the direction for a whole new profitable marketing campaign.
I offer a site content audit to help marketers ferret out this gold and create a strategy for making it shine. If you’d like to have me do some detective work on your site, contact me at sarah @ healthymarketingideas.com. (Just take out the spaces – they’re there to keep spammers at bay.)
For a more in depth look at how to make your website work harder for you, be sure and check out my report written just for health marketers, “5 Internet Marketing Mistakes . . . And How To Fix Them For Online Success.”
If you’re a B2B business you might be interested in the B2B version, “Turn Your Website And White Papers Into A Recession-Busting Dynamic Duo.”
Be sure and sign up for one of these maps of what your website should be doing. And then let’s get treasure-hunting . . .
