Your site should be full of helpful tips, tricks, and advice. Sure, I get it, you want to sell your product or services. And giving away information for free doesn’t exactly get people in the buying mood.
Or does it?
More searchers today are looking for “how to” advice than those who are actually shopping. Don’t believe me? Did you know that Amazon gets less than 2% of the total search market share?
I find that absolutely incredible. Like most people, when I am searching for a product, I go to Amazon first — not Google. And I know I’m not an anomaly in that. And even if only one out of ten people went to Amazon first for product searches, that still means that shopping searches are relatively small overall.
Which produces a conundrum for businesses. We want to sell stuff. But searchers by and large are not searching to buy stuff. Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with my opening statement: Your site should be full of helpful tips, tricks and advice.
The more you are willing to give searchers what they want, the more likely it will be that they will give you what you want. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but at some point they will be looking to buy what you’re selling.
When that day comes, what happens? They will either do a search, or they’ll just go to the site they already trust because it gave them helpful tips, tricks, and advice. That’s you!