Online selling has become one of the most powerful ways to make money in the modern world. However, sadly, there’s a ton of bad information out there that might be hurting your UX and your conversion rates. So let’s take a quick look at some of the worst offenders:
We Need Traffic!
Yes, you do need traffic. But you don’t need any old traffic. What you want is traffic which includes your target customers. It is better to get 10 interested qualified prospects visit your site each day than 100 random hits. Too much effort goes into creating content for SEO and SEM campaigns without considering the value of the traffic.
Emulation is A Guarantee of Success
Copying other people’s ideas is often the way that people get started online. If XYZ Company is making a ton of money then all we have to do is do exactly what they do and we’ll make a ton of money too – right? Sometimes this strategy will work but all too often it’s a bad idea. If you’re not creating something new with additional value; why would your competitor’s customers choose to deal with you? They already have a trusted source that sells what they need in that manner - you’re superfluous to their needs.
Blogging for Blogging’s Sake is Great
There may be SEO value in creating blogs about the canteen at work and the appointment of your new junior receptionist but who cares? If your customers visit your blog and all they find is endless talk about your business from within – they’ll be leaving before they do much else. Your blogs should be written with your user in mind. If they don’t add value to the user – don’t write them in the first place.
SEO is Hard
Actually, SEO is getting easier by the day. If you create great content, make it easy for people to share and regularly promote that content – you’ll find that SEO is pretty easy. It’s all about semantic search and that means Google is looking for regular updates of quality content. Include the occasional link to the outside world and internal links to other content on your site and you’re pretty much all the way there. That doesn’t mean SEO is so easy that it’s instant but it does mean you don’t have to follow too many rules to get found in Google either. And don’t keyword stuff… that’s so 1990s.
We Must Be All Over Social Media
No, you mustn’t. There are companies out there desperately trying to maintain dozens of social media presences and doing them all badly. It is much better to work out which channels are of the most benefit to your users and just work with those. Spend more time on developing great content and less time dumping out a post a minute on those channels too. Social media is a powerful tool for your business but spamming the channel won't work very well at all.
Image Source:
Hongkiat (link to image)
Microweber (link to image)
Social Positives (link to image)
Zillow (link to image)
