Small business owners stay small for a reason. Some choose to stay small and others make decisions which hinder their growth. Probably one of the biggest mistakes you can make online is avoid using data to grow your website.
A lot of small business owners make the mistake of focusing on SEO and social media without setting clear goals or defining key performance indicators. For instance, how are you able to create an SEO strategy without knowing which keywords are the most likely to bring you sales? Here are three simple steps to grow your site based on data:
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Drive paid traffic to find converting keywords
Investing a few thousand dollars on a website does not mean that it is done—even though your designer might have signed off on it. At best, your website is an unproven hypothesis. You do not know which combination of text and design works best or if visitors will love it as much as you do. Therefore, it can be best to drive a little traffic to find out which keywords convert the best.
Google Adwords can be a good tool for doing this. Simply install a conversion pixel into the backend of the page you are driving traffic to and monitor the results you are getting. In particular, keep an eye on the keywords which bring the most clicks, and ultimately, the most conversions. They can be the best keywords to use in your search engine optimization.
Use converting keywords to set a long-term strategy
Once you know which keywords are the best for your business, it is time to invest in SEO or content. Strictly speaking, you could use tools like Spyfu, SEM Rush orKeywordspy to find which keywords your competitors are using. However, even if you know these keywords, you will not know how well they are doing with those keywords—even if they are spending a lot.
Once you know the keywords for your website, you have a basis to reflect on the type of products and services your audience is most interested in. From that, you can extract ideas for blog posts, tweets, Facebook updates, infographics, or even eBooks to better reach your market. You can test the interest by creating a blog post for the hottest keywords and then drive some traffic to it.
Spend more when you can make a business case
Instead of simply focusing on what to spend, you also need to ask yourself why you should spend. What is the purpose of investing more? What specific business objectives do you want to achieve? Just saying that you want more customers might technically be true, but you need to decide on exactly how many and how valuable each customer is to you? When you know that, it can be a lot easier for you to work out exactly what you want to spend.
If you have collected a lot of data from driving traffic, you should be able to identify opportunities you can take advantage of. For instance, you could find new ways to advertise based on what you learned from your initial efforts. After you have maximized your online spending, you might want to consider reaching out to the same market offline.
Conclusion
In this article we have considered three simple principles; driving traffic to find keywords that convert, setting a long-term strategy based on these keywords, and then spending more when there is a basis for it. In case you do not have the technical or marketing skills to do this, don’t worry. If you just understand what you want and why you want it, you can let someone else figure out the how.
About the author: Bjarne Viken
Bjarne is a conversion optimisation strategist, who works with marketing managers and business owners to scale up their businesses by analysing how they can improve their online conversion rates.
He has worked extensively with many growing companies, helping them drive customer acquisition, push conversions and increase sales.”
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