What comes before SEO, Social Media and Inbound Marketing.
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Apr 01, 2010
This is not really a chicken and egg question, so what does come before SEO, Social Media and Inbound Marketing. When many businesses think about increasing their traffic they start with all the usual terms of SMO, SEO, Social Media and Inbound Marketing. This is before they consider the functionality of their website. Your website should always come before undertaking and Social Media or Inbound Marketing.
Why your website functionality comes before any SEO, Social Media or Inbound Marketing is that you need to consider if your website is capable of converting your new visitors into leads. What is the point of any increase in traffic if we cannot covert any of it into leads or customers? A good way to view your website is a part of your overall sales process and look to see how your website integrates into it. This should always come before undertaking an SEO, Social Media or Inbound Marketing.
You can see why this is an important step before you do any SEO, Social Media or Inbound Marketing. A quick test would be to write down your sales process in simple steps and see how or if your website adds to the sales process. Let's take an example of a car dealership, the reason why I picked that one is that most times the sales has to take place offline in person. Their sales process might be something like this:
1: Potential clients comes in or phones up about a particular car.
2: After an initial chat with a salesperson may agree to test drive
3: Once returning from the test drive the fun starts with the valuation of their current car etc
4: And so on
So what we want to do is to figure how their website can feed into this sales process even before we consider any SEO, social media or Inbound Marketing. Take the website www.maxwellmotors.ie, I know that they have recently changed their website so that is why I am using them as an example. Overall their site looks very good but does not add to the sales process. What I would be look for is various landing pages that would let me book a test drive, arrange a valuation on my own car something that places me on the first step of the sales process. When I compare this website against the BMW site, where I can request a quote, build my own car etc. For the BMW garages their leads are well on the sales process. So they now can start thinking about SEO, Social Media and Inbound Marketing.
A simple test to perform to see if you are ready for SEO, Social Media and Inbound Marketing is to ask yourself if someone rang me up what would be the next step and can my website help in that process. If the answer is no then you are not ready for an SEO, Social Media or Inbound Marketing.
And if your website is ready for social media and inbound marketing then join SiliconCloud's webinar next we on Social Media for Business. Where we will cover why and how you can use social media for your business. Click here to register. Social Media for Business