Linking in your website

Search engines ‘crawl’ through websites looking for the words your customer enters into the search box. Deep, and meaningful, website links allow for more pages to be returned from your website (increasing its ranking); it also gives you the means to increase your customer relationships and sales.

The search engine looks in different places on your website to find the searched words, here are some of the places it searches:
– page title
– meta-descriptions
– keywords
– image names
– image descriptions, and
– content.

The more you use the searched words (keywords), the higher you will appear in a search. Be warned, don’t stuff all the keywords into your content or you will make the page an unintelligent mess.

Savvy website owners, who remember the days of website crawlers, ensure that they cross-link their website. When a search engine comes across a link to another page, post, or product, it will follow this link and search the page for the information listed above. The higher the number of instances it finds for the searched words, the higher your website will be returned in the search.

Here are some useful ways to increase the links in your website:

– Recommended products
– Upsells
– ‘People also bought’
– Testimonials, and
– Links between related blog posts or products.

Recommended products

‘Would you like fries with that?’ It sounds cliché, but you’ve worked hard to get your customer to your website – make the most of it. Suggest another product, you never know they might have been looking for that too! Don’t waste their time though (remember, we are increasingly time poor), send them to products that you know will help.

Here’s a freebie hint: when you get them to the recommended product, make sure you sell them the benefits of the product AND link them off to another product.

Upsells

‘Would you like to super-size that?’ OK, so you don’t always have to sell something bigger, but make sure you sell something more. Is there a little (or large) something extra, that would coordinate with the item they are buying? Do you have it packaged in a set with something else? Both of these are opportunities to upsell. Don’t forget my freebie hint: sell the benefits & link on!

‘People also bought’

Peer pressure, kids are fabulous at it and adults aren’t immune. Customers like to know that others share their tastes. They like to know that others trust your products. They like to know that the benefits you are selling are true & others have benefitted. Please be honest though, you will lose the opportunity to have a repeat customer if you lead them up the garden path.

How do you find out what others buy? You can trawl through your sales records, but many e-commerce platforms will tell you the ‘most popular’ item on your website – so use that! Alternatively, if you use a webmaster tool such as Google Analytics, you can look at the products with the most hits and promote that item. Better still, do both!

Testimonials

Following on from ‘people also bought’, is linking to your testimonials (or reviews). One of the most powerful sales tools available is the endorsement of another person. It instils confidence in your customer that you have met the needs of others, and are more likely to meet theirs. This personal interaction helps, not only to instil trust but, to develop a relationship with your customer. Sales are founded on strong relationships (one of the key benefits of social media); testimonials allow customers to ‘hear’ what others say, foster trust, a sense of brand identity, all leading to a development of a relationship. Think of it as beginning a new friendship: you see someone you like, you hear someone say nice things about them, it sparks your curiosity, and you go over and have a chat.

Links between related blog posts or products

Blog posts are a fabulous way to create content to keep your website current (a key to achieving a high Google rank), a way to create content for your social media, a way to sell benefits, and a great way to engender trust and build relationships.

When you link to related posts, you are helping to answer more of your customer’s questions, building trust, and building relationships. When you link blog posts to products you are educating and selling benefits.

Linking across your site ensures that search engines find more of your site, if they find more of your site – so will your customers.

I hope this encourages you to dig deeper into your website. If you would like Write to Right to check your site to ensure that it has all the right words in all the right places, then contact us or have a look through our Website Health Check packages.