We know better than ignoring user trends, especially in the current digital era when search engines are changing dramatically from month to month.

The only real way to make your website competitive is to pay attention to how the search and digital marketing landscapes are changing as people’s preferences online change, too.

1. 65% of digital marketers struggle with generating organic traffic

Generating SEO leads is a whole ‘nother beast to tame, but you won’t even get to this point if your website is gather flies.

No website will thrive without organic traffic in the long term, because there has to be genuine interest in the content that you publish on your platform.

To create more traffic for your market, it’s important that you have a viable content strategy for the short term and long term, and this should be combined with on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical SEO.

Ironically, many SEO agencies don’t pay attention to the SEO of their own websites, relying too much on PPC campaigns. You should definitely practice what you preach: if you are teaching your customers that content is king, then you should have kingly content yourself, drawing in more organic traffic and generating more SEO leads for your business.

2. 74% of businesses want more conversions from their traffic

Whether your website is currently drawing in 1,000 impressions or 50,000 impressions per month, the more pressing issue is whether the elements you are adding to your website are actually converting, or are translating to sales.

Large quantities of organic or paid traffic are essentially useless if your conversion is too low to offset the costs of advertising and developing your website. Below are some quick tips to improve conversions on your website:

– Reduce the number of fields on electronic sign-up forms, to increase the number of opt-ins.

– Guarantees can reduce last-minute resistance and improve sign-ups and purchases of special offers. Make sure the guarantee is clearly stated on the promotion, so it naturally stands out (visually).

– Use direct language in the active voice. Speak to the reader directly, and try to be conversant instead of sales-y.

People are naturally averse to sales-y talk especially if they are not yet ready to make a purchase, so it’s important to tread that line carefully so you don’t turn off potential customers.

– Gather and display testimonials on your website. Social proof is huge in this day and age, when the Internet is so full of fly by night operations and scammers.

Social proof will put new customers at ease and will increase their interest in engaging your business more, even if it’s just chatting with you through your Facebook page or through a chat interface on your website.

People will naturally be drawn to websites that are ‘guaranteed’ by other business owners who have tried out your services before.

– Listing down the technical aspects of your services is important when it comes to transparency, but it’s actually more important for you to tell clients outright how your offers are going to benefit their businesses.

Tell them outright how your SEO packages are going to increase their sales and the profitability of their websites. Explain how their competition is getting ahead because they’re doing such and such – and they aren’t.

– Special promotions and opt-ins should be placed above-fold for the best results.

– If you are running PPC campaigns, be sure to create dedicated landing pages for these and don’t forget to conduct A/B testing with your landing pages.

3. Only 29% of businesses engage their customers after a purchase.

This is a huge mistake on the part of businesses because nurturing existing customers and making them happy even after one (or several) purchases is key to good businesses.

Obviously, people are going to expect a little special treatment because they are old customers, so you can go crazy on offering them exclusive, time-bound offers.

But here’s the catch: you mustn’t use the old technique of telling customers that an offer is about to end when you really plan to extend it for a month or more.

It is better to be upfront about these things: if a promotion is going to run for two months, tell them the actual duration of the promotions. Why?

Because we don’t want to condition your list that your offers are extensible, and the promotions are flexible. We want them to be responsive when an offer is about to end in a week or a month, and we want them to take you seriously.

If you nurture your old customers and current SEO leads, the extra effort (which is easy with automated marketing tools) will actually lead to 33% less digital marketing expenses in the long term.

Another benefit of nurturing leads is the amount of money that people are willing to spend. Did you know that nurtured leads can spend up to 47% compared to non-nurtured leads?

This is a huge difference and this is actually connected to the people’s mindset about the brands/businesses that engage them online.

Obviously, brands that constantly communicate, even if it’s only a random industry update, will gain the trust of people more than businesses that email only once a year to sell a new product. The takeaway here is you have to build a genuine relationship with your customers so it doesn’t look like that you are not just after boosting sales.

4. 93% of digital marketers state that they get better results with content marketing strategies than traditional modes of advertising

While display advertising and PPC will always be around, the fact that people are now more information-driven and only gain interest in a business after gaining valuable insight means your business has to increase its leverage when it comes to generating content. The content has to be user-centric, in-depth, and useful to the most number of users, and organic traffic will come naturally if you continue the effort.