Digital Content Strategy Guide: Part 2 – Selling Your Services

Chapter Two: Selling Your Services

Your website should work as hard as it can to promote your business and sell your products. That doesn’t mean you should be taking every opportunity to sell your products directly. A website that is obviously only interested in getting a sale will turn people off. They want to do business with a company that actually cares about them. You need to show that you want to offer them something that helps, rather than simply chasing the cash in their pockets.

Answer questions

A huge number of Google users are looking for the answer to questions about your industry, or the kinds of products that you sell. Who better to answer those questions than you? By selecting keywords that are questions, and having pages and blog articles set up to answer questions, you are catering to the needs of a huge number of internet users. They are searching for answers, and if you provide them you gain their traffic instead of a competitor, prove yourselves to be experts, build trust, and increase your brand awareness.

About the business

People like to know who they are dealing with. Social media has made it easier than ever for people to connect with brands. Even the biggest multinational corporations use social media to give their brand personality. Consumers don’t want to deal with a faceless entity. Your About Page is the first place they will go to learn who you are, what you believe in, and why you do what you do.

An About Page should not be like an encyclopedia entry on your company. It should tell people why they should do business with you. It is not a place to push your services, but to create a positive impression of your brand. Things you should feature in your brand page can include:

• Why the company was founded (much more important than when)
• Who are the company?
• Staff photos and bios – at least the top management. Smaller companies might want to include everyone; show yourself to be a little family.
• What sets you apart from other companies – the extra levels of service? Your green credentials?
• Your customer care procedure?
• Testimonials from previous happy customers
• Awards you have won

Be creative, and make sure you choose the right tone of voice for your brand. Are your customers looking for formality or a light hearted touch? Make sure the tone you choose is consistent throughout your website.

Natural linking

Your site visitors will take a journey through your website. While you might intend their final destination to be a purchase or a sign up to the mailing list, you have to make sure the paths are in place for customers to do that. Every page of your website should have a link to take visors on to the next step. They want as much information as possible, so you need to make sure they can easily find what they want. Link relevant pages together so readers always have another step to take until they are ready to buy.

Remember: Google finds and indexes pages by following links. Having plenty of internal links (links between pages in your site) makes it easier for the Google bots to find all the pages, which means people will be able to find them too.

Location specific

People want information that is as relevant as possible to them. This often means being close to their location – after all, advice and guidance for subjects could be completely different in New Jersey than in California. People want the right information, and that means being local. It’s no longer enough to have a single page for your services covering all areas.

Breaking your content down into location specific pages has several benefits. It allows you to hit a wider range of keywords, for starters. It helps give your site visitors more pertinent information, and it gets more pages indexed.

Next: Targeting the right keywords

By now you will have noticed that we have mentioned keywords a lot. SEO is a very important part of your content strategy, and in Chapter Three, well go through everything you need to know.

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