After having an email exchange with Heather Lloyd-Martin, I know I need to take a step back to get a bigger perspective on what I’m doing re website renovation. The net of my exchange with Heather was that I will use fairly competitive, generic keyphrases on my home page.

Those keyphrases will be ‘SEO copywriting’, ‘B2B marketing’ and ‘marketing consulting’, or some variations on those. They won’t help much with traffic. I’ll never get to the top of the search engine rankings for them, but they are representative of what I do, and, when people are referred to the site or input ‘Bolen Communications’ in a search engine, they’ll know they’ve landed in the right place.

I’ll use long tail keyphrases for the other pages on the site. I’ll be able to get high rankings (and low PPC prices) for those. Again, not a ton of traffic, but very focused. People using those (as yet to be discovered) arcane keyphrases will be looking for exactly what those Bolen pages are selling.

And this brings me to the new metaphor/meaning of ‘Funnel’.

My newsletter is named ‘The Funnel’. It’s a straightforward interpretation. It refers to leads generated by marketing campaigns. It’s a well known lament in B2B marketing circles that salespeople cherry pick the leads that are ready to close (usually about 20%) and throw the rest away. That makes for lousy marketing ROI. So, smart marketers manage the funnel. They keep those ‘not ready to close this month’ leads warm and engaged by delivering RELEVANT and USEFUL CONTENT. That’s where Bolen comes in.

As with any discipline, the SEM/SEO world has its own buzz words. As I move deeper and deeper into this world, I’m learning the language. ‘Funnel’ in this sense means how you route prospects through a website. You get them to a particular page through their search (either organic or PPC). Then, as long as you’re not selling them an impulse item, you lead them by the hand, gently persuading them to keep them involved (warm and engaged!?), until you deposit them at your conversion goal. Which could be the sale, or filling out a registration form for a free whitepaper, or whatever.

It just occurred to me that the two funnels aren’t dissimilar. It’s the same concept. You have prospects that you need to keep engaged and you do that with RELEVANT and USEFUL CONTENT. The main difference is that in online you can do it with one transaction. It’s not a ‘drip’ marketing campaign that might stretch over weeks or months, but happens within minutes. That doesn’t mean you can shrink a year long sales cycle down to minutes online, just that you can build goals at intervals along the cycle, and have immediate feedback re which pages they visited, how long they stayed on each, and whether they ‘converted’ or not.

It’s all falling into place. And it’s good.

Tags: content, Copywriting, keyphrases, selling, SEM, SEO