Practice Makes Perfect When It Comes To Your Website

What is optimization?

Optimization is a process of making something as fully perfect and functional, or effective as possible. If you apply this concept to your website, you will want to make it as user-friendly and easy to navigate as you can. Planning for this success will help you later down the road with your marketing techniques. 

Optimization at a very high-level means:

• Creating and optimizing your blog posts
• Perfecting your social media strategy
• Tweaking your landing pages
• Organizing your conversion opportunities 

A great analogy to this is thinking about having a party. If you have a party, you invite people. If you have nothing to do for them once they get there — there's no games, drinks or food, what's the point in having them there? So, with your website, you want to make sure that it's a great site.

What do your visitors experience?

Reexperiencing how things are for people arriving at your website is important. What do they do when they get there? What do they read when they get there? What makes them want to stay on your site and enjoy their experience — similar to a party.

You will want to first optimize your website, because that encourages traffic. Websites that are not optimized will not attract, convert, close or delight your website visitors into leads or customers. When optimizing your website, think of yourself as a surgeon. It's very careful work.

Who should you optimize for?

Often we think about optimizing our websites for search engines. However, that's actually not as important a priority as optimizing your website for your human visitors first and foremost. Think about it — it just makes sense, because search engines aren't the ones who are buying your products or your services, people are.

Let's look a little bit deeper at website visitors before we talk about optimizing for them. Website visitors are simply people who are landing on your website. They find you through some of your different marketing channels, whether that be a Google search, social media, email marketing or even pay-per-click. Your website visitors are looking at your different content: your home page, your blog posts, your products and pricing.

You want to attract as many qualified visitors to your website as you can, because more visitors simply means more opportunities for leads, and opportunities to close those leads into paying customers. You don't just want any visitor to your website. You want visitors to your site who are the right visitors that are going to convert into a lead, and eventually close into a customer.

Optimize For Your Buyer Personas

Previously, we've discussed the importance of knowing who your buyer personas are. Our most successful customers here at Inbox direct their marketing efforts on their buyer personas. Here's a great definition of what they are: buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that marketers create to research and actually represent their customers. They refine all marketing activities. In every industry, you need to know who they are, whether you're an ecommerce or nonprofit, you need to angle your marketing activities for them.

Moving forward, your marketing actions need to be dictated by your buyer personas. Everything from a blog post, to offers, to calls-to-actions, to your conversion paths, to lead nurturing campaigns and automation need to be specific to the individual buyer persona and the product or service they're looking for.

Conclusion

Attracting people to your website shouldn't be left to chance with a website that has a bunch of different pages willy-nilly. Optimizing — and perfecting — your website for your buyer personas helps you to better capitalize on all the information you gather about them and create a unique experience that they will enjoy and can also easily navigate.