There’s nothing more disheartening than seeing visitors flooding into your site thanks to some good campaigns . . . But then not sticking around.

This is the frustration Bret Hoyt Sr., president of contract manufacturer Vitakem Nutraceuticals, was experiencing.

“Our website wasn’t working for us,” recalls Hoyt. “We had visitors coming in but very few were contacting our sales team.”

Hoyt approached me to see how we could turn this around.

Identifying The Problem(s)

Since the best solutions are built on a clear understanding of the problem, we started with a website content audit.

First, through an initial interview, I ferreted out the goals for the website, Vitakem’s USP and the competitive environment. Then, by examining the website data and assessing the website’s content I gathered clues that helped paint a picture of why website visitors were skipping away at the drop of a hat.

Here’s what I discovered:

The initial copy had been well optimized for search engines. But the human visitors had been largely ignored. In fact some of the website copy was downright unintelligible.

Adding Glue To The Webpages

Drawing on my knowledge of the nutrition industry and interviews with Vitakem’s sales team, we honed in on the pressing issues most prospective customers care about. I replaced the website’s existing copy with copy that was written for these potential customers while maintaining optimization for search engines.

As a result, the site’s overall bounce rate dropped from 57% down to 40%, with some individual pages dropping from bounce rates into the mid 80′s to bounce rates in the 20′s and 30′s. These numbers told us that less people were  “bouncing” off the pages (leaving soon after they’ve arrived).

Lead Generation Tactics

Now that visitors were sticking around more, we wanted to take them to the next step – initiating contact. The only invitation offered to visitors to contact the sales team was a Request-A-Quote link or a bland Contact Us option.

The site offered no opt-in incentive to visitors who were not ready to get a quote. Even worse, by making a quote request the sole contact option, it framed the whole sales discussion around pricing.

To change the focus of the conversation, we created a white paper, “6 Questions You Should Ask When Choosing Your Nutritional Supplement Manufacturer”. This paper positioned Vitakem not only as a service provider, but also as a helpful partner in making the crucial decision of choosing a contract manufacturer. And it took price away from the center of the initial conversation.

To gain more traffic, the report was also repurposed into several SEO articles that were used for two purposes: 1.) To bring in traffic through SEO and article marketing; and 2) as part of a survey and 3-part email series sent out to lapsed leads bringing them back to the sales team.

Following on the heels of the report download came a carefully-crafted 11-part autoresponder series. This series highlighted the report’s tactical information. It also prodded prospective customer pain points, reminding them of how Vitakem could help them. Each autoresponder’s call to action encouraged the prospect to call the sales team.

Finally, as an added push to encourage even more visitors to get in touch with the sales team, we created a 2-minute video. The video welcomed visitors to the home page and directed them to the report offering.

A Website That Helps Grow Business

Vitakem’s CEO and President, Bret Hoyt, Sr. couldn’t be more pleased with the results, “Since implementing the marketing funnel Sarah created, we’ve had a 20% increase in leads,” Hoyt reports. “But even more importantly, these leads are already pre-sold on our services helping us with our lead conversion.”

By finely tuning the messaging on the website, the report and the autoresponders to tap into prospective customers’ most pressing problems we made Vitakem an option visitors couldn’t ignore. The website and the report spoke to their questions, doubts and interests. And as a result, more visitors contacted the sales team and more of these leads were predisposed to like what they heard as the process continued.

Concludes Hoyt, “Overall, investing in Sarah’s expertise and keen understanding of the nutrition industry has been invaluable for my business.”

For more information on how a lead-generation strategy like this could help your B2B nutrition industry website, be sure and get this meaty report:

“How To Turn Your Website and White Paper Into A Recession-Busting Dynamic Duo”

Or email me at Sarah @ HealthyMarketingIdeas.com to schedule an appointment to discuss your marketing concerns

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 . . .

Do you have that sinking feeling that something is not quite right with your website?

You’re getting tons of traffic, but no one’s sticking around to buy . . .

Or the traffic is only coming in at a slow trickle . . .

Are you seeing visitors taking the time to sift through your content if they arrive on a good article . . . but still not purchasing?

Are you not seeing the website conversion rates you hoped for?

If you’re seeing any of these symptoms, your website may be suffering from content non-conversion-itis.  In other words, it may have some content issues that are causing it to . . .

1. Fall in search engine rankings and consequently lose organic traffic.

2. Lose that incoming traffic instead of turning it into happily browsing visitors . . . or . . .

3. Intriguing visitors without turning them into customers or solid leads.

If your website is doing any of these - or even worse, all three – it’s time to see a doctor.

And this doctor makes house calls – at least to your home page via the internet.

As an online health copywriter I see these kinds of problems in websites all the time.  The exciting thing is that they are problems that can be fixed with extraordinary results.

But the first step is identifying them.

For this reason, I offer a special service – the Natural Health Website Content Diagnosis

With this content diagnosis, you get a comprehensive website review and report.  I’ll show you where your website content is working . . . and where it’s falling short.

The content diagnosis is not the same thing as a technical website analysis.  Nor is it a comprehensive SEO survey.  It doesn’t include looking at off-site SEO strategy.

A content diagnosis includes:

1. A collaborative intake process.  With you and your team, I review your website and marketing goals, your ideal customer profile, your keyword strategy and more.

2. A careful look at your analytics to see how visitors are using your site – what content is bringing them in, keeping them there and  – ugh – making them leave.

3. A page-by-page analysis of your content (up to 15 pages) to see if it’s meeting my 5 Content Criteria.  Is it Customer-focused? Clear? Competitive? Conversion-oriented? And Consistent?

4. A total site review with a 31-point usability checklist.

5. A full report and debriefing in order to help you see your website’s weak points and discuss how they can be improved.

These 5 services are all covered by a one-time fee of $1000.

Without a good strategic plan for improvement, it’s easy to throw away $100′s, $1000′s even $10,000′s.

With a plan, you know exactly what to do to get results.

So if you have your suspicions, but don’t know where to start, shoot me an email to schedule a diagnosis.  Email me at sarah@healthymarketingideas.com. 

Take the first step in making your website a conversion-machine.

If you’d like some more information on how to improve your website’s marketing might, get a copy of my FREE report: For Natural Health Marketers: 5 Internet Marketing Mistakes . . . And How To Fix Them For Online Success

1. Nick brings a world of experience in writing for the web.  He’s got 25 years of copywriting under his belt, 11 of those years devoted strictly to writing for the web.  I’ve witnessed his expertise firsthand as one of his coaching students.  I know how much insight he brings to the topic.
2. This course allows you to build on something you’re passionate about – whether it be growing fruit trees, singing, sci-fi books, whatever!  You can build a site – or several sites – around just about any interest. 

We’ve just finished painting the house, fixing up the barn and raking the yard.  Our house is looking pretty good these days.  And I just put a whole pile of nice dry leaves in the chicken coop (much to the consternation of the chickens who thought it was a herd of foxes and hawks combining forces)

It’s really nice to pull in the driveway and see things in (relative) order.

However, I was brought up short by my virtual home . . . and its need for some TLC.

See, it’s easy to get excited about the traffic you can drive to your website with social marketing.

I’ve already seen an increase in activity since I’ve stepped up my presence on LinkedIn and even tweeted a bit.

But then what . . .?

What do they do when they get to your website – your home?

Thanks to a couple kind visitors, I found out that my website had several broken links and some squirley publishing problem that my software support person had to send me a video about to fix!  Which led me to examine my analytics closer and try to figure out what’s happening for my visitors.

I want them not just dropping by, but leaving their calling card.  Hey, even giving me a call for my copywriting/ marketing services or grabbing a great course off my website.

So, with all this getting busy in the social marketing sphere, I’ve realized I need to go back to basics, too.  I’d like to be spending my weekend unlocking the secrets of Twitter.  But I’ve decided to refocus on home base.

 Here’s what I’m looking at for starters:

1. Fix those broken links.  Can’t invite people into a condemned home.
2. Think carefully about the different paths my visitors are taking . . . and what I want them to take.
3. Look at my website and ask myself for each page, what do I want my visitor to do here?  Each page is an opportunity to convert – the question is to what?
4. Revise copy, design, links to get my visitors on these paths.
5. Then, get back on Twitter and unlock its secrets.

Pam Foster, web-writing queen, has put together a great web copy checklist that I’m certainly going to put to use for my own web site . . . as well as my clients’.  You might like to take a look at it.  It’s superb.

http://www.awaionline.com/2009/11/client-friendly-web-copy-checklist/

So get engaged with social marketing – it’s a great way to build a buzz and get some traffic.

But make sure they don’t just come swerving through your house like a bat out of hell.  Give them some direction, serve some tea and cookies and encourage them to linger for a while and sign the guest-list at the very least.

What do you have on your website checklist?