"SEO and the Offer" by Dori Gilbert

Recently I’ve looked at a couple of websites from completely different industries, and both were actively seeking traffic through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  What I was looking at mainly was “the offer.”  Once you do grab the attention of your audience, and get them to your site, do what you can to keep them there and participate in a series of actions.

To do this, there must be a compelling offer.  This is assuming your brand positioning is where it needs to be, and you are presenting your uniqueness in a clear statement or story.

An offer doesn’t have to be a discount – it can – but it doesn’t have to be.  An offer is a compelling reason that I as a site visitor should “read more” or “click here to…” or even hand over my email address by signing up to your newsletter.  An offer can be anything along the marketing funnel, like a free report, or a video, or a tip of the day, or an article, etc.

Notice I said “a compelling reason…” This is a great place to think of your target audience (or market).  What is it that would be compelling or pleasing to them? As an example, I picked a rather general category, email marketing, and after conducting a search in Google with that term, looked at a few of their offers.  I clicked on search results and ads, and if you do a similar task, you’ll see various offers presented simply and clearly on signing up for a free account, a free trial, or learning how email marketing works.  You can see from this simplified research that the email marketing companies are targeting small businesses and individuals that are new to email marketing.  The messages are targeted to offers that help the reader ease any concerns about how hard it might be, and break down the barrier to trying it by offering it for free.

Maybe email marketing was not the best example, because of offering services for free.  I am not saying anything about offering your services for free (also called “freemium”) – that’s a topic for another day.  I’m saying that your offer should be clearly presented on the home page or landing page when a visitor finds you from search.

How do you know when you have the right offer?  The short answer is, when you are pleased with the number of people participating in it.  It might take some testing of different offers to find the sweet spot of your audience.