Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [112]
The customer base was passionate about their horses, and the traits that stood out were partly competitive and partly relationship, but all concerned the health and demeanor of their horses. Rather than reading through pages of medical research that supported the claims and effectiveness of their nutritional supplement, the customers wanted justification for the product. The health benefits and the testimonials, simply presented, made it easier for them to communicate to their friends.
Freedom Health then went about changing the entire website to communicate this message. Incorporating the message into the navigation, primary information architecture, and structure of the website refined every sales point into a simply communicated, content-rich statement. The testimonials were powerful, because they communicated the benefits of the product in customer-specific terms. They used the primary benefit statements that addressed the concerns of prospective customers and matched the testimonials to the specific content of the pages.
Simplifying the tagline and the marketing focused on giving Freedom Health’s loyalists a simpler message to tell others. The surveys found that the best and most loyal customers came from word-of-mouth marketing. By providing the loyal customers with a simpler message and rewards, it would make it easier for customers to spread the word to their friends.
Freedom Health took the feedback of the customers, reworked both the value proposition and the sales message, and redesigned the website around the words and influence of the customer feedback. In doing so, they improved their visibility, attracting 800 percent more visitors to the website from search engines and social media within three months of going live with the new website. More than that, the leads from the website increased 400 percent, which reinforces the concept of listening and testing your message with your audience.
Friday: Plan for Misspellings and Plurals
Many of the questions I receive in my seminars deal with keyword selection. It has to do with how to rank for both singular and plural versions of words, misspellings, and word variations. Many times, this leads to a larger discussion, so I will address it here, because this is also related to credibility.
Misspellings
A Canadian friend of mine, Ian McCanerin, alerted me to an interesting phenomenon. Ian worked with Canadian companies that did a lot of business in Quebec, where by law information has to be presented in both French and English. He noted that searchers, particularly in the Latin-based languages of French, Spanish, and Italian, tend to leave out accents in their search terms. I mentally filed this away for future use. A few years later I was working with a French company and recalled this valuable piece of information. In developing a keyword strategy, the research shows that typing in search terms without the accent marks was a strong tendency among searchers. This immediately prompted questions about how to address misspellings in an optimization and marketing strategy. Fortunately, in this digital marketing business, there is no shortage of information, and the research always takes you to the information that you need.
When researching keywords, we immediately noticed that most people searched with the incorrect spelling of the term, because they were not searching with accent marks. So, while many companies were optimizing for a memory card in French, carte mémoire SD, French searchers were overwhelmingly searching for the grammatically incorrect version without the accent mark, carte memoire SD. This was also a case where Google