A Business Approach to Website Design: Sell the Sizzle – Not the Steak

In the online world, your competitors are just a click away, and as potential customers visit sites searching for answers and solutions, your best strategy is to anticipate their questions or problems and be the place that best answers their questions.

In other words: sell benefits, not features.

Do you feel like your website could do better at generating website traffic? Would you like to convert a larger number of those visitors into leads and customers?

A business approach to website design focuses on problem-solving to generate more leads. Get a stronger solution-oriented marketing approach with these tips:

Identify problems to feed your content

To find topics to delve into, turn to the people on the front lines of your business every day. Team members working in Account Management, Customer Support, and Sales hear questions and work through objections multiple times a day. Open up communication and start documenting these questions and problems -- along with ideas for what has helped close previous deals. You could even utilize your team to help write your blog posts as a guest writer!

Lay out the How-Tos

Success starts with helpful content - and blog posts can focus on how to solve your customers' problems! This article itself is helping you solve a problem - correct? You are learning tips that you can use to grow your business. Just like this, focus your blogs and content on providing actionable insight. This gives you credibility and authority as a thought leader and expert in your field.

Don't Ignore Long-Tail Keyword Traffic

A well-rounded SEO strategy should focus on capturing long-tail traffic, which offers a great opportunity to be more solution-oriented with content. Long-tail keywords are search queries more than 2-3 words, ad are usually questions or problem statements, like "tips to grow your social media audience", or "what is the price of a website design", or "how to manage a website redesign." Focusing your content on these types of long-tail keywords helps position you as an educator instead of a push salesperson, but it also is vital for higher search rankings faster. You may find that this content will be found by users for months as it remains relevant.

Monitor social media inquiries and respond

An active presence on social media can help contribute to your industry reputation as an expert and thought leader - one that solves problems. Pay attention to conversations and questions posed within your networks, industry forums, LinkedIn groups, and sites like Quora. Make note as these are great fodder for blogs and page content, but also take the opportunity to post tidbits and questions. Also, if you notice a topic relating to a problem that you'd already written about - share your post! This will get your content out there and also help folks in that group.