Cultivating High-Probability Prospect Magnets
If you want to make your 2023 goals easier to achieve, let’s make this the year that your website starts working for you! 🙋‍♀️
When your website works for you, your high-probability prospects come to you effortlessly , even when you are sleeping!
When you optimize your website to do the heavy lifting for you, you won’t just be getting more visibility, you’ll be getting more visible to the people who are ready to pay you. đź’°
Catapult your visibility in 2023!
Listen to this podcast interview for the best tips for improving your SEO value in 2023.
If you do SEO yourself, these timeless tips for adding SEO throughout your website and blog posts will be very helpful.
The Sassy Strategist, Kim Dawson, asks all the right questions about all the right SEO things; questions that all businesses have.
Grab your coffee. Have a listen. Set yourself up for success in 2023!
So the funniest thing happened to me this morning.
On my way to a meeting, it dawned on me that I should have a video handy. In order to view that video, I needed a password, so, I got that and opened a browser to test it.
I could not remember the exact name of the page, so, I did a search on Google.
Well, well, well…I found the page I wanted, PLUS a page that I had no idea was listed in Google.
The page name was “test”.
Evidently, in May, 2020, I was testing how the syllabus of my online SEO course would look on a page.
I guess I didn’t like it since the page had not been renamed nor linked to nor added to a menu, and, instead, had been totally forgotten.
Naturally, this morning, I wanted to deactivate the page right away, but, I couldn’t because 1) I was heading into a meeting and didn’t have the time, and, 2) I know the proper way to deactivate pages so that I preserve SEO, and that takes a couple more steps than just logging in and deactivating a page. The “test” page had been listed in Google for over 2 years.
I needed a 301 Redirect!
And, this website had no plugin for adding 301 redirects, so I installed one.
When the Redirection plugin loads for the first time, it provides simple 301 redirect instructions on its Welcome Page. Basically, you need two things for a 301 redirect; a source URL and a Target (destination) URL.
Read those, and click Start Setup. Setup is easy. Here’s the choices I made for this website.
Once the setup was complete, I clicked on Redirect, then Add New.
Before filling in the blanks, I copied my Source and Target URLs into Notepad so that I had them handy.
I returned to the website Dashboard and added a 301 redirect. I copied the slug from the Source address and pasted that into the Source URL. Then copied the entire destination URL and pasted that into the Target URL space and saved.
After saving the 301 Redirect, I edited the “test” page and changed the page status to Draft.
Then I went into Google and repeated the original search. The page was still listed as “test”. When I clicked on the link, the destination URL (I put in the 301 Redirect) displayed.
So that is the process I used to remove the page from Google while maintaining my SEO value.
One issue I encountered on this website is that it is my programs website and does not have content nor blog pages; just sign-up and enrollment pages. Choosing a destination page (target URL) for my 301 redirect was a little more challenging. In the end, I chose to redirect the “test” page to the enrollment page for my words-based SEO course for non-techs which is my longest running and most popular course.
Try using this process and let me know your success, questions, and comments.
Coincidentally, I hosted a webinar last week on this exact subject of adding 301 redirects. It was called, Preserving SEO when Deleting Pages. Deactivating pages is effectively deleting pages. I can’t help but notice the serendipity of how this happened today. Just sayin’.
Hi, my name is Karen Callahan and I’m a really busy entrepreneur. For 25+ years, I have been developing websites. For about 15 of those years, I’ve been studying search engine optimization (SEO), implementing SEO techniques, and training clients on how and where to use SEO in their websites.
Like everyone else, I’m too busy to give all the social media channels a proper go. Even the select few in which I choose to have a presence (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram) suffer from my inability to cut out the time to add original content. Most days, about all I can squeak out is thumbs up, likes, bubbling hearts, and an occasional encouraging comment.
I DO want to support my business colleagues and friends, and, I don’t want me and my business to be absent, so, it will come as no surprise to you that I’m pretty much always seeking the “quick magic”. And that is why I was originally attracted to Allan Dib’s, The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd.
It was the 1-Page lead in that caught my attention. “How is that possible and if it is, teach me”, is what I was thinking. As a thriving business, I need to have systems in place that leverage my time and efforts. I purchased the book, read it, loved it, and, started implementing.
The concept that resonated with me the most was to target your high-probability prospects. Your high-probability prospects want your product (or service) and are ready to buy.
”Even in a narrow target market, all prospects should not be treated equally. All other things being equal, the more money you can spend marketing to high probability prospects, the better your chances are of converting them to a customer.”
― Allan Dib, The 1-Page Marketing Plan
It takes courage to leave everyone else behind, but, this concept made so much sense to me. We are all busy and we all have limited assets: limited time, limited funds, limited hours, limited energy. Why spend any of those assets marketing to the folks who might purchase? I want to go for the gusto and market to those who want, need, and are ready to buy my services.
First, I had to define who those people (firms, businesses) are. Then, find out where they hung out. Join that social media group in order to learn their “lingo”, and, especially learn how they describe the work I do. Then, I was equipped with the intel I needed in order to incorporate their words and terms in my marketing materials.
Not only did I incorporate this concept of focusing on high-probability prospects into my marketing materials, but, I now use it as a foundation in my Simple & Sustainable SEO System course.
Like the courses I seek, the Simple & Sustainable SEO System is an easy business system for busy entrepreneurs. It was especially designed for non-techs who regularly write in their blogs who need to have simple and reliable systems in place.
My high-probability prospects are not drawn to the name of the system. Generally, when they see those words, they believe that they are not technical enough to have success “doing” SEO.
The truth is, I teach participants how to use their words. How to use the right words in the right order in the right places. No statistics. No algorithms. Simple.
We start with changing mindsets from “can’t do SEO” to “Yes, I know my words and can use those”. Then, we move to setting the foundation by answering the question, “Who are your High-Probability Prospects”?
They do like my lead-in conversation entitled, “Train Google to Rank you Better”.
A couple of years ago, I created a poll on Facebook listing a number of Titles that I had been considering for my Simple & Sustainable SEO System online course.
One of the responders suggested “Train Google to Rank you Better ” and lots of others voted it in.
I now use the “Train Google to Rank you Better ” as the lead-in conversation (and soon-to-be webinar) to the SSSS online course.
In teaching the course (originally, in person) throughout the years, I learned that participants have a very difficult time letting go of “everyone” as their potential audience. They are afraid to not be all-inclusive, and are concerned that the people that they currently service/provide for will go away when they “openly” reach for only a segment of the group.
All else being equal, the energy that is in place (the flow of the current clientele) will remain in place until you take steps to change it up. If you want to elevate the business, you need to claim it. While that new segment is growing, the energy that was in place, stays in place, so, you will be able to sustain yourself throughout growth.
You claim it by writing about topics that are of interest to your high-probability prospects and by using their words and terms in your content. That is how you make content interesting to your target audience and increase your readership. They like the topic. They identify with the lingo. But, first you have to get them to your website.
In order to get them to the website, you need to add a few tweaks to your words; maybe change the order or location.
The techniques that I teach in the course focus on writing for your high-probability prospects and the search engines at the same time. Not possible you you say? Read my exploration of Good Storytelling and Good SEO.
The SEO system that I created is aligned with my busy work life in that it is a lean business system that leverages my time and efforts. I produce content in less time, and, the content does double duty working for me while I am otherwise occupied and attracts high probability prospects and the search engines.
I am a busy entrepreneur who uses simple business systems so that I can leverage my time and efforts to get the best results from those efforts…and…I even created a simple system to help other busy entrepreneurs.
You can transform your life by focusing on the audience that wants the work you most want to be doing. Commit to learn more about these high-probability prospects and write for them.
I started this piece wondering to myself, “Good SEO and Good Storytelling: Can we have both?”, and I gotta tell you, I was skeptical.
As I researched further, I discovered that the answer is YES we can. Purists on either side will argue, “Yeah, except…” But, let’s leave perfection aside and focus on doing the best we can with what is in our control.
First of all, let’s talk about why I was feeling that SEO and story might not be compatible.
Primarily, I worried about the flow. Wouldn’t the SEO techniques disrupt the momentum of the story?
Whether thrillers, memoirs, or sci-fi novels, the stories we read for pleasure have a flow that captures our attention and transports us into another world. I like the “feel-good” and romance stories. The cadence is easy and light. There is often a hint of mystery or element of intrigue that keeps me reading to the next sentence, paragraph, and chapter.
But, does flow matter when it comes to corporate storytelling?
The stories that I wondered about are the ones published online for business purposes. They might entertain, but entertainment is secondary to the underlying business objective.
I asked Amanda Grazioli, small business copywriter & brand messaging consultant, for her thoughts about good business storytelling. She explains,
“The human brain is wired for story. When our emotions and senses are involved in processing new information, we remember it more clearly and for longer.
Strong brand storytelling on your website can help you connect with your customers on an emotional level, helping you to authentically gain their attention and build trust.
Much like a great fairytale, storytelling for the web needs to have certain components like specific details, three-dimensional characters, and a plot (the before state, the transformation, and the outcome). But instead of merely engaging or entertaining, stories in your web copy need to serve a specific business purpose.
That purpose might be to highlight your commitment to a particular value, building a bridge between you and your customer. Or, you might use a story to show how a person just like your reader avoided pain and achieved great things thanks to your product or service.
Regardless, story is being used to lay the necessary groundwork for the reader to confidently take your desired action—whether that’s subscribing to emails, making a purchase, or booking a call.”
With this advice in mind, when writing a great business story, we want to:
But, what good is a story if no one knows it exists? That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.
Before delving into this topic, I worried that the choice, order, and placement of the words that appeal to the search engines would break the good storytelling cadence.
To me, SEO-powered content has always felt a little stiff and jagged. It requires adding specific words in a certain order in particular places to help search engines understand who we are, what we offer, and how clients benefit from working with us. It’s unemotional and formulaic work.
Well, the two approaches have different target audiences.
Writing to capture the interest of different audiences is typically accomplished through writing different versions of the same article. You may be familiar with creating personas in order to develop your marketing strategy. We create buyer personas to help us focus our content to appeal to each specific type of prospect. Writing to a specific persona may change the words we use and the stories we tell.
When writing a business blog post, one of your target audiences (or personas) is a human and the other is a search engine that cannot do complex thinking. The requirements to help a search engine understand our message and intention for writing the piece are different from helping a person understand the same.
You might be thinking right now, “OMG. I have enough on my plate. Why should I care about the search engines? I’m networking and engaging on social media all the time. I get plenty of engagement and responses to my posts.”
I hear you. The thing is that the search engines have the power to bring us many, many more prospects than we could ever drive to our websites on our own. I’ve been adding SEO to websites and teaching on-page SEO for over 15 years. I have attended dozens of Google presentations. Every Google expert I’ve learned from has affirmed that Google will always drive more traffic to your website than any other source. (This is not just boasting. When you consider Google’s reach and the referral sources and actions (shares, comments, likes, etc.) included in the Google algorithm, mathematically, it would be easy to prove. But, that, my friends, is a blog post for another day.)
When writing to appeal to a search engine, we need to provide the right information about us in a format that the search engines understand.
When we do that well,
To take the possibilities even further, we want the content to be so informative and entertaining that our readers become our advocates; commenting on and sharing our content and returning regularly to read new posts and share those, and so on and so on.
Having humans advocating for us complements our SEO efforts and silently influences the search engines’ decision about the ranking and placement of our content in the search engine results pages. (Yes, search engines evaluate our social engagement as part of their ranking factors.)
When we focus on the search engines as our target persona, the words we use and the structure of the story are most important.
Words: SEO involves rules, algorithms, and statistics that evaluate our words. For bots to understand your writing it is important to use “the right words in the right order in the right places”.
Using “the right words in the right order in the right places” shifts the quality of the traffic you bring to your website. General traffic is replaced with traffic by a highly targeted audience of high-probability prospects. High-probability prospects are ready to buy and that improves your probability of making a sale and, consequently, increasing your conversion rate.
Structure: One of the characteristics of the structure is that it indicates the most important to the least important. In our case, it helps humans and search engines understand which is the most important information in the article.
Luckily, there are built-in structure-indicating tools (called tags) that all web browsers understand. The browsers look for these in order to display content as we intend it to be displayed.
The two most common structure tags are heading tags (heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, etc.) and paragraph (Paragraph) tags.
<h2>This is my Chapter Heading in between the tags<h2>
<p>this is my paragraph in between the paragraph tags</p>Using these tags we can structure our blog posts for easy reading by humans and search engines. [Learn more about using heading tags for SEO.]
Can we meld storytelling rules and SEO rules to create one piece of content that is equally attractive to humans and to search engines?
Search engine experts assert that if we structure our content for the best human understanding (see article by Yoast), the content will automatically be in the best format for SEO readability and comprehension.
But writing content that is emotionally evocative, useful, and has a solid SEO structure is a tall order. Like me, you may be wondering where to begin.
I suggest starting with good storytelling techniques and then overlaying the story with best-practice SEO tactics.
We know that stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end.
We need characters, a storyline, and, an intention.
In order to engage human readers, we need characters they care about, a plotline that piques their interest, and a hook that helps them identify themselves. Maybe the hook is a character. Or it might be the problem or location.
To capture the reader’s interest, it’s beneficial to consider their intention for consuming this piece of content. Are they doing product/service research? Are they following do-it-yourself instructions in a how-to article? Are they reading in order to gain knowledge in their field? This is where the development of personas helps keep our writing focused.
Meld all of those considerations into a story arc that is familiar to readers. In general, we’ll follow this sequence.
As a copywriter, Amanda Grazioli recommends that the stories we craft for our business websites be:
| Relatable | The reader has to see themselves and their struggles/goals in the story. |
| Purposeful | There needs to be a clear business objective for the story (building brand affinity, showing a use case for a product/service, demonstrating a positive result from a past customer in order to prompt sales or inquiries). |
| Concise | Editing is key. Attention spans are brief. Every word needs to count. |
| Real | Your authentic brand voice and personality need to come through. |
| Well-formatted | Story needs to be broken up visually using whitespace, H2 sub-headers, images, etc. to be scannable/digestible. |
| Paired with a CTA | There should be Call to Action button/link on the same page as the story, and the action should support the story. |
Following this approach, we can have both good storytelling and good SEO in the same post. In fact, many of the components that create a great human reading experience also help strengthen our SEO efforts.
| Component | Helps Readers Understand | Helps Search Engines Understand |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword-Rich Article / Post Title | Yes | Yes |
| Headings: Sections, Chapters, Subtitles | Yes | Yes |
| Keyword phrases mixed with re-stated phrases mixed with semantically-related phrases | Yes | Yes |
| Bold words | Yes | Yes |
| Clearly stating your intention | Yes | Yes |
| Descriptive text link | Yes | Yes |
| Words that evoke emotion | Yes | No |
| Article / Post URL | No | Yes |
The takeaway? We can stop thinking of it as Good SEO “versus” Good Storytelling and take specific steps to achieve Good Storytelling “with” Good SEO.
What are your thoughts? What would you add to this article for us to consider?