How to obtain accurate user conversion through SEO, SEM and WeChat public account operation?

How to obtain accurate user conversions through SEO, SEM and WeChat public account operations? How to use SEO technology to double the website's accurate traffic with zero budget? How to use SEO techniques to effectively drive traffic to other media platforms? How can SEM achieve maximum conversion at a lower cost? How can WeChat public accounts quickly attract fans (precise fans) through low-cost operations? In this article, the editor of Dongguan Internet Promotion will reveal them one by one for you!

How to obtain accurate user conversion through SEO, SEM and WeChat public account operation

1. Treat SEO as one of the means of website operation and promotion, not all of them.

SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. It can be simply understood as improving the ranking of a website in the search results page by utilizing the search engine's algorithm rules. When you become interested in a product and want to learn more about it, what do you usually do?

I believe many people will understand it in these two ways:

• Ask friends directly (involving brand awareness)
• Search it yourself on the Internet (using mainstream search engines)

SEO is to make your website information appear at the front of the search results page when users search for relevant words on the Internet, so that it is easier for users to see it first.

How to use SEO technology to double the website's accurate traffic with zero budget? How to use SEO techniques to effectively drive traffic to other media platforms (such as official accounts, Zhihu, etc.)?

(1) Find the right keywords

A. Related to the company's business

Analyze the actual situation of the industry and understand the company's specific business through the company's relevant leaders, marketing department, and sales department. Select keywords based on the company's business scope, target user distribution, industry, product-specific vocabulary, and the company's understanding of its customers.

B. In line with the user's actual search situation

• When users know you and want to learn more about you through the Internet, they will generally search directly for your company or brand name to check.
• When users are only interested in finding products in a certain industry, they usually search for product words, common industry words, and corresponding long-tail words.
• When users do not know you and have no intention of knowing you, but are just searching for relevant industry information or browsing industry news online, they will search through certain common industry terms and crowd terms, and may also see you inadvertently, thereby knowing you and arousing their interest.

The different parts of speech of these words also represent different levels of intent of the search users. On the one hand, we can understand users’ search preferences through data such as the Baidu Index, and on the other hand, through user surveys.

C. Able to compete with peer websites

You can understand the difficulty of optimizing this keyword by looking at the keywords and strength chosen by your competitor's website, the level of Baidu Index, and the competitiveness of keywords in the same industry. Only by choosing corresponding keywords according to your own resources and capabilities can you get a good ranking.

For example, "piano", "piano training", "Shenzhen piano training", "Shenzhen piano beginner training institution", different words have different search volumes, and the degree of competition and optimization difficulty are also different.

Choose words that are relevant to the company's business, in line with users' actual search situations, have a certain search volume, and can compete with peer websites based on your own resources and capabilities. Only such words can bring accurate and effective traffic to your website, rather than relying on your own subjective conjectures.

Source: Xiaoma Song

From the perspective of SEO, keywords can be divided into core keywords (brand words, product words) and long-tail keywords (other words, long words and words composed of keywords). Core keywords are usually placed on the homepage of the website and are the main optimization words. Long-tail keywords have less competition and smaller search volumes, but are more accurate, so they are also what SEOs must pay attention to and study.

(2) There are two main ways to attract traffic to a website

A. Get traffic by improving website keyword rankings

SEO traffic = site impressions x page click rate

Although the core keywords selected by general websites have a larger search volume, due to competition, the number of core keywords that a website can optimize is very limited, and the number of homepage positions that its ranking can occupy is also limited. Therefore, in addition to relying on the ranking of the website's core keywords to obtain traffic, we should also use the ranking of a large number of long-tail words to harvest traffic. The advantages of certain long-tail keywords are more obvious.

For example, between a person searching for “basketball shoes” and another searching for “Nike 2018 new men’s basketball shoes”, who will have a stronger understanding and purchase intention?

By maintaining continuous and regular construction of high-quality content on the website's special pages or content pages, making good layout of title keywords and article content keywords (the word "four places"), focusing on the optimization of internal and external links of the website, and focusing on the transfer of weight, as many long-tail words as possible can get good rankings, thereby obtaining more display and click opportunities.

Doing SEO cannot be done simply for the sake of ranking.

Traditional SEO often just uses search engine algorithm rules to pile up ranking influencing factors. The only purpose is to improve the ranking, and it often ignores the importance of website and content operations.

In an era where user experience is increasingly important, SEO also needs to pay attention to analyzing user search needs, understanding what users hope to get when they search for this keyword, and creating different high-quality landing page content based on different keywords. Otherwise, even if the ranking is improved, users will find that it is not what they want after clicking, and the page content cannot attract them immediately, and they will close it immediately. What's the point?

High-quality content can attract users' attention and interest, and good content design can directly achieve specific conversion effects.

Therefore, by ranking good core keywords and a large number of long-tail keywords, we can occupy more traffic entrances on the search results page to acquire a large number of browsing users for the website.

B. Get traffic from outside the website

Many people answer questions on Zhihu, and they usually mention their official account, brand, product name, etc. in their personal signatures and answers. Another way is to place links to related content or other recommended content in the answer. If this link is also linked to Zhihu, we call this kind of link an internal link. If it is linked to outside Zhihu, such as your own website or WeChat article, we call this kind of link an external link. This is one of the most accurate and effective ways for us to use SEO external link techniques to drive traffic to websites or other media platforms.

Smart use of account names and signatures

Cleverly use anchor text external links as bait

You can use keywords or titles related to your website content to find websites and platforms related to your industry or that meet the characteristics of your target user group, and bring traffic to your website or platform by placing anchor text external links. Of course, you must also pay attention to complying with the rules of each platform. When some platforms do not allow links to be placed, you can use certain keywords or soft articles to attract traffic.

In addition, through third-party platforms, such as self-media, forums, portals, Baidu products, news sources, etc., consciously choose article titles with specific keywords or long-tail keywords to write and publish high-quality articles. On the one hand, we can use the traffic of these platforms themselves, and on the other hand, these contents are likely to be included in search engines and get good rankings; and for platforms such as Toutiao, Dayu, and Penguin that use algorithm distribution mechanisms to recommend different content to different groups of people, we must pay attention to platform rules and user preferences to set the title style and content, so as to gain more exposure.

In this way, a matrix layout is formed by using as many third-party platforms as possible and utilizing a large number of keywords, long-tail words and content. After a long period of accumulation, it can even achieve the effect of full network coverage. This will help you grab more rankings and exposure, and bring a large amount of continuous and accurate traffic to the website.

For example, at that time, our peers in the same industry did not pay much attention to Internet promotion, and the keyword competition was small, which undoubtedly gave us a good opportunity. In the end, when users searched for certain relevant industry keywords in the industry, our product information accounted for more than 60%, bringing dozens of times growth to the website's natural traffic.

When the website starts to have a fixed amount of traffic, a more in-depth analysis is needed to determine the source of website traffic and the user's browsing behavior path, dwell time, conversion, etc., to adjust the website's content planning and screen different channels.

After talking about the free method of website traffic, let’s talk about another paid method.

2. The essence of SEM is to purchase accurate traffic

After the Wei Zexi incident, although it had a great impact on the bidding industry, through understanding many friends, colleagues and users who consulted me, I found that most people still do not know how to distinguish between bidding and natural ranking. In non-medical industries, people who really have needs do not care about these things. The most important thing is to find what they need.

The difference between SEM advertising and natural ranking

1. The essence of buying traffic is to buy effective users

Compared with SEO, SEM is more free in creative display and page content creation. Its ranking is related to keyword settings and bidding, and is not affected by search engine rules.

In addition to promotional skills, bidding also requires an understanding of your own products and competitors' products, as well as a grasp of the target audience's psychology. From keyword mining, setting up a bidding account, to keyword bidding strategy, regional and time period delivery, creative copywriting, marketing landing page design guidance, and customer service/sales communication, all of these will affect the final result. The entire process is funnel-shaped, with conversions ranging from display, click, visit, consultation, and order (in some industries, the visit leads directly to registration or ordering).

When talking about SEO, we mentioned that users will search for different keywords multiple times to learn about us. The different parts of speech of these words also represent different levels of purchasing intention of the search users. Due to the diversity of information, most users often conduct multiple searches and comparisons before making a purchase or taking further action.

Simply put, the user's conversion behavior in the search stage is a stage of excessive demand.

• Phase 1: Gain interest, collect information, and learn about related product introductions - large search volume, low conversion rate
• Phase 2: Product comparison, compare advantages based on your own needs, prices, etc. - Medium search volume, conversion
• Stage 3: Brand selection, clear intention has been generated, and there is a certain degree of trust - small search volume, high conversion

From knowing-familiarity-consideration-purchase process

For SEM, more attention should be paid to grasping the user's mentality at every stage. Because it involves the rapid consumption of advertising costs, SEM should pay more attention to the final conversion effect. How to obtain more accurate traffic, reduce the user loss rate at each link, improve the conversion rate of each link, and finally obtain effective users to promote orders is an important means to reduce CAC (customer acquisition cost) and improve ROI (return on investment).

Promotion conversion funnel and factors affecting conversion in each link

2. How can SEM achieve maximum conversion at a lower cost?

(1) Account optimization requires increasing revenue and reducing expenditure

The scope and accuracy of SEM advertising are inseparable from the selection and bidding of keywords. From the perspective of funnel thinking, account optimization must grasp four words: increase revenue and reduce expenditure. Increasing revenue means opening up traffic, and reducing expenditure means preventing invalid traffic. Increasing the budget, broadening the matching mode, and lowering keyword bids are all ways to increase revenue, while narrowing the matching mode and doing a good job of negative words are ways to save money.

In the selection of keywords, on the one hand, we need to maximize the potential customer group, and on the other hand, we need to accurately target the target customer group.

(2) Refined account construction

I prefer to advocate refined management of the entire account. When initially setting up the account, I would make detailed classifications of the account structure. For example, I would divide keywords of the same dimension into long-tail and core categories to facilitate efficient management. You can also divide keywords according to different levels of audience mentality, consumption capacity, etc., using the characteristics of the target audience as a reference.

Source: Internet

(3) Write different creatives for different keywords

Different keywords represent different needs of different users. Different creative ideas are written specifically for different keywords and target groups. Short sentences are often used to highlight product features and the attractive points of the target audience, while focusing on the popularity of keywords. Thereby gaining more interest and clicks from target users.

For example, for milk tea franchise, users with capital and investment experience pay more attention to the return on investment, and the creative can highlight "annual income of XX million"; while some users with less capital and no experience may be more concerned about how to open and operate a store with the least cost, in this case the creative can highlight "0 franchise fee, 0 deposit, full training and guidance" and so on.

(4) Design different landing pages for different creatives

You can classify the keywords and corresponding creative ideas, and design different landing page contents for different groups of people and creative contents.

The landing page is the most directly related to whether the purpose of sales or conversion can be achieved directly, so the design of the landing page is one of the most important conversion links in the entire promotion process.

Conduct interviews and research. Before making a landing page, you must truly understand the characteristics of the industry, understand user needs from the user's perspective, dig out the user's real pain points, find out the user's dissatisfaction, eliminate the dissatisfaction for the user, and tell him how to solve it. This way, the problem can be solved. That is, think about the problem from the user's perspective, help him solve the problem, and help him find reasons to convince himself. (I remember that I had learned sales skills from the ladies in the supermarket for nearly a month. The difference in the transaction rate between product thinking and user thinking is really huge)

For example:

For brand words, we use the content of brand strength + product features + product value + user trust + consulting discounts to design the landing page content; and for product words, we use the content of brand strength + user pain points + solutions + product comparison + user trust + consulting discounts to design the landing page content.

This can improve the consultation (order/registration) conversion effect of the page. You can also compare through A/B testing, gradually adjust the page, and increase the number of consultations (orders/registrations).

At the same time, do a good job of accumulating account data, comparing and observing the data, analyzing the differences between the data, promptly discovering the source of the problem, and deciding the optimization direction of the entire account based on the data information.

By adjusting these methods, we have more than doubled the number of consultations while keeping the budget unchanged.

By laying out common channels, we can occupy traffic entrances; and by spreading brands, we can occupy user awareness. Official accounts are one of the important ways for us to spread our brand and accumulate, cultivate and convert target users.

3. WeChat public account operation, value determines success or failure

We are in a very niche ToB vertical industry, which belongs to a management system dedicated to a certain industry, but I won’t say which one it is. Our potential target users nationwide, that is, users with purchasing decision-making power, number around 20,000 to 30,000, while the number of people in the same industry is around 70,000 to 80,000. The users are between 35 and 55 years old. However, the products have the characteristics of high price, low repurchase rate, and long project implementation cycle...

The essential difference between To C and To B users

At the beginning of 2016, our company started to operate a WeChat public account. At that time, the editor was responsible for operating the content of the official account. Later, I helped to establish the community, do live broadcasts of conferences, create micro-classrooms, invite industry bigwigs to give online lectures, and so on. Later, when the bidding account became stable, I hired a new SEMer to take charge, and I began to focus on the operation planning of the official account. By learning from other industries' public accounts to increase fan fission and conduct user activities, the number of public account fans has doubled in more than three months, the average number of headline readers has increased by more than three times, and the number of monthly effective consultations through the public account has increased by dozens of times. When he had more than 8,000 followers, he created the first article in the industry with over 100,000 readers.

1. Is the WeChat dividend really over?

Very few of the users who are converted from our official account to our product consultation are due to our marketing activities; the vast majority are proactive inquiries from users.

At present, we only rely on attracting new fans and promoting their activation. With almost no active marketing, we only provide an inducing entrance for people to understand and consult about the products, and naturally achieve fan conversion. (In fact, we do not provide software trials, nor do we have any promotional activities)

Official Account Menu Entrance

After our sales contacted us over the phone, about 70% of the information was confirmed to have a clear understanding of the intention and proceeded to the next step of communication. We call this filtered information effective consultation (information).

Compared with the first few years when WeChat first appeared, the effect of WeChat now is indeed not as good as before. Firstly, with the increasing number of public accounts, people have too many choices in content; secondly, the emergence of various platforms, such as live broadcasts and headlines, are also constantly dividing people's fragmented time. But no matter what changes are the new forms of content delivery or the new forms of content presentation, the importance of the content value itself remains unchanged.

How to use official accounts to provide unique content that is truly valuable and recognized by users will become increasingly important in the future. Compared with the mass field with more and more content and more intense competition, the scarcity and professionalism of vertically segmented industry content are more advantageous.

2. What else can a corporate official account do besides writing about products?

From the very beginning, all our work has been centered around targeted fans. In order to expand the brand influence, we have simply expanded our target to people in the industry. Due to the characteristics of the industry, we are very clear that non-precise fans will not be of any help to our actual work, and precise fans are the real users that we can eventually convert and generate revenue from.

(1) Focus on users and provide them with valuable things

How to provide users with valuable things? What do users need? Before all promotion and operation work, you need to make a clear portrait of your users, analyze the characteristics of users from the dimensions of occupation, age, city, family, income, interests, tags, etc., to truly understand your users and know what they want and what they are interested in.

At the beginning, we prepared a list ourselves, listing some content that users might be interested in, as well as WeChat usage habits, etc. We asked the marketing department to provide us with a list of users who had purchased our products, and then we called them one by one to inquire. In this way, we can decide the type of content that the official account will provide every day, as well as the frequency and time of push notifications. The most embarrassing thing at that time was that we encountered many older users who used WeChat infrequently and some did not know how to perform basic WeChat operations. It took a long time to cultivate habits among some users. This is also the reason why our article reading rate is lower than that of other industries. Later, we use the data from the social network and official account background to judge the user’s preferences, and use this to test and adjust the content.

Retain users and promote activation by providing fans with industry policy information, knowledge, micro-classrooms, academic conference live broadcasts, community operations and other forms of content; judge the value of articles and user preferences through data analysis such as the number of readings, forwarding and sharing, and the number of likes of backend articles, to screen and adjust content types, and attract new users by increasing the forwarding and sharing of content.

On the other hand, after testing several different methods, the best way to attract new users for our user base is to share information and valuable information. Micro-classrooms have recently begun to try to do fission sharing. Previously, they used registration forms to collect user information.

We have also tried charging fees, but the results were average. We generally offer services for free because we don’t make a profit from it. Our goal is still to spread the brand. However, the results of the most recent course fission were also not satisfactory. On the one hand, it was due to the resistance of new users. It may also be related to user characteristics (status, low job competition pressure, lack of motivation to learn) and course content (only as a supplement to growth management knowledge, rather than professional skills training), resulting in a low fission rate.

Therefore, we also plan to try to change the approach. On the one hand, we can let new users listen to the course first, gain their trust and recognition of the course, and then adopt the fission method; on the other hand, we can follow the official account first and then join the group. Those who forward and share can participate in the lottery. In this way, we can attract more people to actively forward and fission. Consider new customer acquisition and conversion issues only after promoting activation.

Next, we also plan to focus some of our targets on users who are about to be or have just been promoted to management in the industry. Compared to the older generation, they are younger, more familiar with and more receptive to new things, and have a higher interest in learning.

(2) Helping users will earn you their friendship and trust.

• A user called us and asked if we would publish a book, saying that he had been reading the content on our official account and it was very helpful to him. In fact, most of our content is collected and compiled from the Internet. Sometimes it is edited again, and there is very little original content.
• Users who have consulted us about our products would say so themselves. They think the content we publish every day is well written, the teachers in the micro-classrooms are also good, and our products must be good too.
• I also saw someone in an industry group mention our product and said that they didn’t know whether the product was good or not, but they often saw information about it and they said it was pretty good.
• There have also been cases where someone had a need and asked an acquaintance about it, and the other person said that he was not satisfied with the products of other companies and thought ours should be good, so he was recommended to use ours.

…

3. The national target user group is less than 100,000, and there are only more than 8,000 fans. How can we achieve 100,000+ articles?

Background article data

Initially, I was inspired by some vertical public accounts and made an attempt to use the characteristics of the fan group to find a connection point between fans and the general public. At the beginning, I didn’t expect that it would really reach 100,000+. Some luck was indeed involved.

At that time, we took advantage of a policy hotspot in the industry. In fact, we had also released the same policy information the week before, but the number of readers at that time was only about 1,000. The difference between the two articles is that the first one was entirely about policy information in the industry, while in the second one, we sorted out the impact of this policy on people's livelihood, as well as the online reactions to this policy, and compiled the more agreed and controversial views. Then, through our fan base, which is undoubtedly more authoritative in this field and closer to the truth, it was forwarded and spread, and it became popular.

The reason why it is possible to break through the limitation of the total number of target groups is that in addition to the spreadability of the content itself (value or emotion driven), the most important thing is the role played by the kol attributes in the fan group.

For example, if a platform targeting doctors releases a piece of information about disease prevention or health care, it may initially only spread within a small circle of doctors. However, the information you send will first attract the approval and attention of doctors, and will have the value or motivation for them to actively spread it. Doctors have a certain influence in the health field in their respective circles. The effect of forwarding information by one doctor is limited. But if the fans of your platform are all doctors, when 100, 1,000 or even more doctors are forwarding it, ordinary people will undoubtedly believe in the information sent by doctors more, and forward it again to inform each other, thus causing the scale of dissemination to be even greater.

Just like many brands now look for KOLs that fit their target groups when organizing events, think about what if your public account fans actually naturally possess certain KOL attributes?

Will this lead to inaccurate fans?

Articles with a total reading volume of over 200,000 brought us an increase of nearly 2,000 followers. According to the data from our official account backend in the previous and next half month, the number of people who unfollowed us in the few days before and after 200,000+ was only about 100. The number of people who unfollowed us within a month was basically the same as before, with no abnormal fluctuations. However, the reading volume of articles after the increase in followers has increased significantly. This may also be related to the fact that we have a clear positioning of ourselves when we guide people to follow the official account at the top and bottom of our articles.

Unfollow data before and after 10w+

4. It is important to find the right channel for yourself

Unfortunately, due to the characteristics of the industry, products, and target groups, the gameplay of many new media platforms is not suitable for us. For example, few of our users go to Weibo; there is almost no traffic when we put ads on Shenma; the user information obtained through Toutiao is of poor quality compared to information from other channels, and the CAC is too high, etc.

However, we will continue to study and try other channels and different operating methods. On the one hand, it is to open up channels and find breakthroughs in performance. On the other hand, the total traffic that can be obtained by any specific method and specific channel is limited. As time goes by, the effect will become worse and worse, and the cost will become higher and higher.

Well, that’s all for this sharing. I hope there will be more opportunities to learn and communicate with you again in the future.