If you have read my ramblings over the months or years on selling into schools you might recall that I stress the need for an exciting headline with an open question as a starter.
Plus a need to focus on benefits in the email and features on the web page.
But what about the issue of “keywords”?
Keywords are words and phrases that people search for when looking for suppliers via Google. They are also words which when used in emails can trigger the reader’s interest and help the reader focus on what you offer.
You can of course spend a lot of money getting a company that specialises in such matters to ensure that your web pages and sales emails have all the essential keywords.
But you can also use your own knowledge of what you sell to ensure that your web pages contain multiple references to the keywords that people are liable to search for.
You can then break these into groups – listing the general key words that a person searching for the first time would use, and moving on to specific key words that define your particular product or service.
In a sense this is a similar activity to the classic approach to starting writing sales emails by asking, from the potential customer’s point of view, “Why should I buy this?” and “Why should I buy this from you?”
As to what the correct keywords are, one way to discover this is simply to write down the key words you think are relevant to your product and then enter them into Google. See which companies come up (if your company does not, then you know you need to start peppering your webpages with these key words) and what other keywords these companies use.
If you find keywords that you don’t use but which you recognise as words that your potential customers could search for, start re-writing your website or, if it is easier, start building extra pages around these key topics.
One of the most important issues here is to move away from individual keywords into key phrases. You might have invented a homework tracker app, so you need that phrase on your website. But you might also want to include “our tracker app for homework” and “homework marks tracker app” and “homework timetable app” and “this week’s homework app” and so on.
Remember that most of the visitors to your site will only go to one or two pages of your website, so the fact that you have multiple pages that repeat much the same information, but using slightly different keywords, is neither here nor there. What these pages are doing is bringing in the readers for the first time, and then having grabbed their attention, moving them on to the sales pages of the site.
Of course, the more key phrases you can put on one page without it starting to look just like a catch-all net aimed at dragging Google searches in, the better. But if the result looks artificial, then it is not going to work.
The whole purpose of this exercise is to progress your webpage up the rankings, and here you do have one great tutorial to follow – what is on the webpages you find when you start doing these researches.
You can’t copy other people’s webpages, of course, but you can see what keywords they are aiming to attract and what techniques they are using.
In order to test how well you are doing in this regard it is always worth measuring how your customers have found you. You can do this by offering a 10% discount on orders on your webpage to anyone who completes a very short questionnaire which asks how the reader came to be on that page. If they answer “via a Google search” you can ask them the phrase they typed in. It is certainly good knowledge to have.
Of course, these pages that attract teachers who are browsing looking for products are not the same as the landing page that you will send teachers to after they have read your advert. You do need both landing pages (the page that the reader of the email travels to) and search pages (which are designed for the reader who is doing a Google search for companies that sell your sort of product).
If you’d like to talk about these different approaches, please do get in touch. We’re always pleased to help with ideas on overall approaches to draw in as many teachers to your site as possible.
