OOPS! Did You Miss The Goldmines Hidden In Your Natural Health Website

Who doesn't love an unexpected great find? As a gardener, I often stumble upon harvests I didn't plant. Like potatoes (one of my favorites). See, each year there are a few spuds that didn't make it into the harvest buckets. They sit in the earth all winter. And when spring arrives, they push through the softened soil to volunteer their tasty tubers. This year I found Yukon Gold potatoes in my squash bed, Banana Fingerlings tucked in among my garlic and some beautiful large Kennebec's thriving in the compost pile. Websites harbor the same delightful surprises. Real solid mashed-potato meals for your business. Pure Yukon Gold. But too many businesses don't look for them... don't find them... Or don't know what to do with them once they do find them. As a natural health SEO copywriter, I find them all the time for my clients and help them put these untapped resources to good use. Here's what I mean. The 3 Secret Stashes In Your Website You Don't Know About 1. The page lost in the archives that's pulling in traffic like a magnet Just this summer I did a website content audit for a client. And lo and behold, when I looked through his analytics I found one page was getting thousands of hits each month. It was an article about fungal infections, one of this business' specialties. Despite the popularity of this page with his visitors, my client had forgotten that it existed. In fact, he couldn't even find it using his website's navigation. Clearly he had a great landing page that was pulling in traffic. However, when I looked more closely, most of the visitors were leaving the page and his website after a short perusal of the page. I realized based on the search terms it was ranking for that many of his visitors needed a little more confirmation that they had come to the right place for their search. We needed to tailor the content a little more, add a sidebar and make sure these new visitors stuck around a bit more. And then we needed to artfully move them deeper into his website towards his sales pages. His website is not alone. Most websites have terrific content that's pulling in traffic but not being used effectively to convert that traffic into customers - or at least hot leads. 2. Pages with high rankings but no clicks It was exciting to find this page bringing in all these visitors each month. But soon my excitement reached a fevered pitch when I looked even more closely at the data. It was ranking #1, #2 and #12 for some very high-volume search terms. Using some raw estimations, if this page was ranking like this it should be pulling in close to 40,000 visitors each month. It wasn't. So I looked at the search engine results page (SERP) for the different terms. This is the results page people see after they put in a search term with Google. It is the page that lists the different options Google has come up with. His pages were up there, ranking well. But the title and description that appeared in the list of options Google brought up did nothing to intrigue searchers. I could tell right away that he was losing potential visitors right from the start, despite its stellar rankings. The people who had searched for one of the terms that brought up his page just weren't being drawn to click on his website listing. See, plenty of SEO's do some meat market page title that just lists a few key words. Like "fungus| fungal infections| natural antifungals". Ho hum. If I'm looking for some help, I'm more likely to go for a title that says something like, "Got Fungus? Best Natural Antifungals For Fungal Infections". And then under the title I'd create an equally intriguing description that ends with a call to action, encouraging searchers to click through to his website. Maybe something like, "Got that sneaking suspicion you're battling a fungal infection? Use natural antifungals to beat fungus safely. Find out more..." These two bits of copy, called metatags, are often overlooked by webmasters, put in as an insignificant afterthought. Some SEO's belittle meta-descriptions as not such a big factor in ranking. I beg to differ. When it comes to SEO, every bit helps in telling search engines the goods are on this page. And when it comes to searchers, if you can't grab their attention and encourage them to come to your site on the search engine results page, why bother ranking?! 3. Hidden high volume search terms you're already pulling with This is a lesson I discovered on my own website. When I looked through my website analytics, I found out that many of my visitors were not the copywriting clients I was seeking, but beginning health copywriters looking for information! I found I was ranking well for terms related to health copywriting resources and courses. I realized that if I publicized the same products I used to keep my business humming, I could get a nice affiliate commission as a result. If I don't create some pathways for this traffic to purchase things from my website, I'm missing out! Not to mention I'm doing a disservice to these visitors who may be looking for recommendations to get their business going. Based on this discovery, I've slowly been retuning my website to help these visitors out. And making some income from it on the side.