One of the great things about SEO and PPC is there is the wealth of data to analyze. Most digital marketing providers should be able to drill into specifics on how visitors find your M&A firm’s website and what they do as the explore it. Bankers seem to appreciate this more than most.
Often times, firms focus on traffic volume increases or simple rank position both of which are valuable, but often over look one key metric – visitor return rate. This metric is the simple measure of how often the same visitor visits a website over a certain period of time.
Why is this important?
M&A website visitors are a lot different than most other Internet audiences. They are not buying anything today; most often they are researching a topic that they have little true understanding of. As such, it takes the average M&A firm website visitor 3 visits before making an effort to contact the firm, be it through a contact form submission, phone call or email.
To have a truly effective conversion strategy in M&A your website needs to be built with return rate in mind.
Improving visitor return rate.
Below are a few strategies for consideration that can improve visitor return rate:
#1. Be sure to have a blog – update it monthly. Giving your visitors new information about a topic they are researching is an easy way to get them to return periodically. Make capturing email or contact information easy to push updates to visitors when new content is published.
#2. Consider implementing on-site chat. Generally speaking, make information gathering as easy as possible. On-site chat is one of the best, proactive ways to reach out to a visitor and offer additional information. While most initial visitors will not engage, knowing that there is a free real time resource to engage with when the time is right will give them a reason to return.
#3. Retarget to previous visitors. When a prospect visits your website, they leave a digital trail. This can be used to proactively show the prospect ads and other calls to action in places like Google search or LinkedIn. Simply being set up to track can facilitate a number of retargeting opportunities that are proven to get users to visit your page multiple times.
Things you should know…
Ask yourself the following questions, if you don’t know the answers, ask us…we can help you find them.
Do I know what my visitor mix is (new v. returning)? To do this, you need to have a Google Analytics accounts. If you are not sure if you have one, we can set one up for you.
Does a visitor have a reason to visit my page more than once? If your information is stale, if the site is not visually appealing or if the information is hard to access you may want to consider updates.
Is my site functional? If your site loads slowly, has broken links or is being penalized in search, visitors are more likely to have incentive to return at a future date.
If you need help increasing your visitor return rate, we should talk. Please feel free to reach us at hello@mergerlabs.com to set up a fee consultation.
