5 Ways To Optimize Your IR Website For Search Traffic
5 Ways To Optimize Your IR Website For Search Traffic
Your brand new IR website has just gone live. You’re thrilled with how the project unfolded – information is now readily available for investors to consume online and you’re confident that it will deliver more interest and inquiries from potential investors than ever before. Yet, your boss has just emailed you about one key question that you hadn’t considered – “Joe, how are investors going to find us?”
Great question, you think. And I need to find out how to respond…
If your first step was to head to Google and find out how you can generate search traffic for your website, you very well could have landed on this blog.
We’ll tell you about 5 ways you can optimize your IR website for search traffic (and respond to your boss’ email).
1. Get your website set-up with Google Analytics
Your website agency should have set your new website up with Google Analytics tracking. If not, click here to get started. Google Analytics is so powerful helping you and your team make decisions. After a few weeks of collected data, you can determine how your website visitors are engaging with your website, and optimize content accordingly. Analytics will give you information such as:
- Your most popular website pages
- Where your visitors are departing your site
- Demographic information about your visitors, and more.
2. Develop a list of keywords you want to rank for
If you are in gold mining, you will want to rank for keyword search terms around gold mining on your IR website – such as “best gold stocks”, “canadian gold stock”, “gold stocks investment” and more. Next, develop a prioritized list of targeted search terms that are relevant to your potential investors.
One of the best ways you can get started developing this initial keyword list is, “if you were going to find your business on a search engine, what would you type into the Google search engine?”
Each month, Google generates over 100 billion searches. Reference
3. Begin to update website content with these keywords
From page titles and meta tags to page content, strategically include these keywords into your site. You might update a page title to, “Your Business Name – Canadian Gold Stock To Put On Your 2018 Watch List” for example. Updating your website with these keywords will play a significant role in your rankings. Be sure to incorporate keywords naturally, instead of stuffing them (Don’t place one keyword ten times in on place on your website). Use them naturally, as if you were in conversation.
4. Develop great content
Great content draws the attention of your website visitors through your IR website, plain and simple. We love using blog content (like this blog you’re reading now) to increase our search ranking and website authority. If your website doesn’t have a blog, it’s time to consider integrating a blog your site. Include those keywords (and a few more!) within your content. Provide topics around general industry education, your latest quarterly report, introduce your team and more.
47% of consumers read 3-5 pieces of content from you before speaking to a sales representative. Reference
5. Links, links, links
When developing content above (see tip #4) be sure to use links, links, links.
There are two ways you can strategically use links to help boost your search traffic:
An internal link means you are connecting one page of your website to another. For example, a blog post might link to a contact page, or your home page might include a link to your investors page.
An external link is a link that leads the reader to a different, outside domain. Can you spot where I did this in the first few paragraphs of this blog?
Most importantly, define your goals and objectives before you get started with optimizing your website for search. If your website has 50 visitors a day, do you want to increase to 100 visitors over the next month? Be sure to define your targets and measure against performance.
If this sounds overwhelming (or perhaps you just want to leave it with the professionals), we would love to talk with your team about optimizing your website for search. To get started, click here to connect with us.
Nicole Van Zanten
Nicole is fascinated with all things Investor Relations, lending her penmanship to Blender's blog subscribers and loyal readers. She's focused on delivering the goods (and latest IR updates) each and every week.
