Wordpress Websites for Business

How Anyone Can Maximize Website Performance and Results

Michael Cordova

• Editore: WildBlue Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781942266808
• Argomento: Design
• Categoria: Web design

A website development pioneer gives business owners—from tech savvy to beginner—the tools, knowledge, and tactics to succeed in today's online economy. If your company is building a new website, you're certainly thinking about content and design. But don't forget performance, especially if you need your website to generate business leads and sales. Wordpress Websites for Business guides you through the process of building a website that will sustain and grow your company. Using the techniques detailed in this book I am currently bringing in more than one million dollars' worth of leads a month for one of my clients. I have used most of the top content management systems and built many custom CMS systems myself. From my experience, I can say that Wordpress is the most effective tool available to build your company's website and bring in leads and sales for your business. However, if used incorrectly, it can actually hurt your company. I've seen it happen, and the effects can be devastating. The good news is that there's a better way. In an easy-to-follow, step-by-step program, this book will tell you what you need to do to avoid the pitfalls while ensuring maximum exposure, search engine rankings, and conversions (sales)! This powerful book features: game changing checklists and resources; simple settings that only take a few minutes, but can make a huge difference in website performance; the best Wordpress plugins and services to optimize your site and maximize leads; the best Wordpress themes that enable you to build an up-to-date website that performs for you; content creation hacks such as how to map your business goals directly to your content; Wordpress best practices simplified, such as why and how to create a child theme; the tools and techniques that drop your page load times to less than two seconds; and much more... The strategies and tactics I present in Wordpress Websites for Business will result in more leads and sales for your company, and that's what it's all about.

Writing Content That Solves Your Customer’s Problems

All of the effort you go through to get your website can be for naught if your content isn’t appropriate. Your site visitors are looking for professionals who can help them solve their problems. Someone they can trust and ideally work with for years. That’s what everybody wants. Everybody. Show them that you can help them accomplish their goals and solve their problems by the content on your site and you have them halfway in the door. The other audience for your content is search engines. They don’t contact you, they give you better rankings if they like your content. Those rankings are important to your business because they can bring you customers.

Writing content that your visitors will appreciate and act on that also results in top organic search engine rankings is not difficult. I describe how to do it below. If you don’t do it right then all of this time building a website will be wasted. Good content is that important.

What Content Should You Write?

In the sections below I’m going to give you a lot of background and tactics about writing quality content. In this section I’m going to describe for you the content that your site visitors will consume voraciously and cause them to become raving fans.

Writing content is the biggest wall that my customers have run across through the years. It has stopped them from having a quality website and from gaining conversions, sales and new customers from it. The solution is, however quite simple.

Your customers come to you because they trust that you will provide the solution that they are looking for, or so desperately need. Where do you get the ideas for the content that they are looking for? From the solutions you have already provided for your existing or past customers.

Here’s what I suggest:

1. Have everyone in your company list the solutions they have provided to customers.

2. Compile and prioritize the entire list by the most benefit provided to your customers.

3. Group the solutions as is necessary. They’ll fall into natural groupings that can represent a series of articles/posts.

This is usually enough information to keep you busy writing for months. Not only that, it represents a body of work and services that your company excels at. As you’re organizing the series of posts that you’ll be writing keep in mind that you want to identify the customer pain points and the words they’ll use when they’re looking for a solution. I suggest typing the questions or search terms into Google and taking note of what Google suggests like this:

The terms they suggest are those that people are actually searching on. This gives you a lot more insight into what terms to use in your content.

Once you have your punch list of articles to be written, the logical next step is to determine what angle to take in writing them, what actually strikes a nerve with your audience to the tune of your readers massively sharing your article. One of my business partners, Pedram Shojai at http://well.org writes voluminously, and the articles he writes get a lot of attention and shares. In order to demonstrate what type of articles that people react to I directed him to BuzzSumo and do a search for anxiety. Here are the current results for that search:

Note that the top two articles have each been shared more than a million times on Facebook alone. If you curated (content curation explained below) those articles on your own blog then shared it in social media you can expect results better than if you have just dreamed up a new topic and wrote about it.

BuzzSumo requires a very reasonable paid subscription at $99/month to fully utilize the complete set of tools they provide, but they also provide a 14-day free trial on all of their subscriptions. I suggest that you get your list of solution-based articles from above together, sign up for the 14-day trial at BuzzSumo then research each of the articles all at once. Put all of the research into a Word doc along with screenshots and links to the top-rated articles so when it comes time for you to write the articles, you have the research completed, and all you have to do is write or curate the article without having to determine the details of the direction of the content. You should be able to do all of it within the 14 days, but if not then $99 for one month is a small amount to pay in order to ensure that your content has the biggest chance of striking a viral chord with your audience.

Another major boost you can get from BuzzSumo is to click the View Backlinks and View Sharers buttons to see who has engaged with the listed articles. The same people may be interested in linking to and sharing your article! This is only available in the paid version, but it is a great reason to get the 14-day trial and make serious use of it. Again, paying $99 for one month will allow you to get a lot of research done.

Powerful and Proven Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website ranked in the unpaid section of the search engine results page (SERP). This is called organic rankings, as opposed to paid Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. The paid ads are well marked on the SERP, if your search was for a local service, then those local listings will be after the PPC ads, and the organic rankings will be below that. Here is a typical search engine results page for a search for Denver automotive repair:

I have done SEO for many customers since the beginning of the Internet, and in one case I multiplied my client’s revenues from half a million a year to $4 million dollars a year, an eight-fold increase. This is what my customer told me. That may not even be possible with SEO today because of the competitiveness on the Internet, but I am mentioning it to show you that I am very familiar with the concept, and can point you in the right direction as far as integrating SEO concepts into your website content.

Clicks from sites that are ranked organically typically have great click-through rates and high conversion rates. This means that the #1, #2 and #3 positions in the SERP are very coveted by businesses. Here is a chart provided by Smart Insights6 that illustrates that the top three organic positions get most of the clicks. This f...