Express Business Systems Fast Track Your Online Business
The following ten tips should help you avoid some of the most common problems:
- Use compelling pictures
- Keep copy short
- Focus each page on a few critical ideas
- Watch colour combination
- Use appropriate fonts for the medium
- Don’t change the “look” from page to page
- Move beyond standard templates
- Not too many clicks
- Don’t overdo animation and sound It can just become annoying.
And last, but certainly not least…
- Don’t design it like a brochure
Is Your Website Copy Crystal Clear? [i]
Pretend you don’t know anything about what your company offers and you stumbled onto it somehow. Can you tell immediately what it’s all about? Can the search engines? Do this exercise with each inner page of the site as well. Is what each page has to offer truly crystal clear? Or does your website presume that people already know who you are and what you’re about?
Often, when a website is originally designed and written, nobody thinks about the fact that people unfamiliar with the company might be visiting it. However, if you want to gain new customers from the search engines, i.e., people looking for your type of product or service (or even information) who have never heard of you before, they need to know within a few seconds that they’ve landed in the right place.
Do you have what they want?
For new visitors, it’s critical for your website to let them know immediately that they’re in the right place and that you have exactly what they’re looking for. Searchers, by their very nature, are seeking stuff. If you have what they want, then be sure to display this information clearly, boldly, and succinctly on every page of your website.
It’s important to do this on every page because, unlike a brochure, people coming from search engines can and will enter your website from any page. There is no linear progression. No beginning, middle, or end to a website. Each page is a gateway to every other page, and many people may never even see your home page. But that’s okay if you’ve done your job properly.
Minimally, each page of your website should have a paragraph of text at the beginning that provides a descriptive summary of what the rest of that page contains. The beauty of doing this is that it’s not only extremely helpful to your website visitors, but also to the search engines. This is why it’s so important to be as descriptive as you possibly can – you’re serving two audiences with the same interests, and neither of them may know anything about you when they first get there.
Being descriptive on your website is often as simple as using the keyword phrases people might be typing into a search engine in a natural manner within your existing copy. You’re presumably providing people with information on your pages already. If your content isn’t using your keyword phrases, you should be asking yourself why not? Interestingly enough, writing descriptively provides you with the opportunity to tell those who don’t know anything about you, i.e., search engines and potential new customers, all about your offerings in the simplest manner possible.
Being descriptive just makes sense!
You may have seen websites that have been “optimized” by simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of each page, or by stuffing them into headlines or other places where they don’t really make sense. This was done to try and fool search engines and while it may have worked some time ago, search engines are now one step ahead and will in fact lower your ranking if you are just adding keywords for the sake of adding keywords. It also often looks silly to your website visitors because it’s clearly not done for their benefit. If there are no paragraphs of text staring them in the face providing them with valuable knowledge, it’s easy enough for them to click back to the search engine and buy from the next website in the list.
Don’t lose them before you even have a chance to sell to them
Once a person is at your site, if you don’t immediately provide what they’re looking for, you could lose them to your competitor simply because they couldn’t immediately see that you had what they needed. Unfortunately, this is an all too common occurrence with websites that were created as an online brochure intended for those already familiar with your brand.
Take a look at your website with fresh eyes. Enlist the help of others who may not already be familiar with your website, and see if they can tell right off the bat what it’s all about. If they can’t, most likely you will find that you have some work ahead of you in this respect; but don’t despair! The benefits of clearly describing your product or service offerings will far outweigh the time investment. What you will find when you fix your pages in this way is a snowball effect. Your search engine rankings will increase, your targeted traffic will increase, your bounce rate will decrease, and your conversions will soar.
Five Objectives of Website Copy[ii]
Often, businesses put a lot of effort into website graphics but not enough into the website text. Informative text is reassuring to visitors and it gives search engines something to crawl. So, where should you start? Let’s look at five things you can accomplish with text.
1. Establish your points of difference
Why would a customer choose to buy from you rather than from one of the many other businesses just like yours? If you bristle at the idea that any business could be “just like yours”, you’ve found something important to communicate on your site.
Tell visitors about what makes your approach to the business unique. If you specialize in a certain area or approach, tell them how – and why. Establishing your points of difference helps your visitors become more informed buyers of the services or products you offer.
2. Satisfy their need to know
Searchers often use the web to do basic research first, only going back later to convert on the site or look up a specific business. To the extent that you anticipate and answer research questions, you give your visitors exactly what they are looking for and begin to earn their trust and loyalty.
To create this content, ask yourself, “What would I need to know if I were in the market for this product or service”? Then, think of different ways to present the information. To help your visitors see how your service could benefit them, consider adding one or more case studies to your site, each of which describes how a customer was able to solve a problem and overcome challenges with the help of your service or product. You might also add a “Frequently Asked Questions” page. Such an FAQ page can be a powerful marketing tool that raises the questions that you think customers might ask.
Sometimes, just by raising an issue and providing information, you will be able to establish a point of difference. As visitors research other sites, they may look for more information on issues, benefits, and features that they learned about on your site. If a competitor’s site doesn’t adequately address something that they have become interested in, you will have gained an edge.
3. Educate
You may not consider yourself an expert in your field, but you probably know a great deal more than you give yourself credit for. Chances are that visitors will appreciate any advice you care to give. Writing articles related to your business and publishing them on your site can put you in the enviable situation of being perceived as an authority.
Consider asking visitors for their email address in return for access to your articles. You’ll build a targeted contact list that allows you to create an ongoing relationship with qualified prospects, send special offers, and continue to provide useful information.
4. Increase your visibility
To a search engine, the best sites consist of many HTML files, each one text rich. If one of your articles mentions a topic for which you have more information, embed links to the extra information like this: “Learn about painting with oil-based paint.” Then, on the page with the extra information, make sure that you have a <title> tag with the appropriate title, in this case, “Painting with Oil-based Paint”. This helps search engines to index your content, which in turn can help give you some visibility.
Even more important, you’ll find that other sites like to link to pages with useful information. Having lots of sites pointing to your articles on art techniques will help artists find your online art store and can improve your organic (unpaid) search engine rankings.
5. Learn what is interesting to your visitors
One of the great things about adding a lot of text-based information to your site is that you can find out which topics and issues are most interesting to your visitors. In Google Analytics, the Top Content report (in the Content section) shows you how many visits to your site resulted in page views of each page and the average amount of time that visitors spent on the page.
The Content by Title report shows the same information, but aggregated by page title. So, if you have an article with several pages of content, and each page has the same <title> tag, the pie chart view will show the percentage of total visits and total page views that relate to the article.
Try to improve your content mix using what you learn from these reports. By keeping an eye on what the analytics are telling you, you’ll learn more about your visitors and be able to provide just the information they are looking for.
Online Resources
There is a wealth of information provided online. Here are some links to get you started:
Build a website: Content on your site
The Australian government Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy provides some great advice on the e-Strategy Guide. Although aimed at non-profit organisations, the site has some great tips and tricks relevant for most businesses.
[i] Whalen, J. Is Your Website Copy Crystal Clear?, http://searchengineland.com/is-your-website-copy-crystal-clear-13477, 28 February 2008.
[ii] DeSoto, A., Five Objectives of Website Copy, Conversion University › Help articles › Onsite Behaviour Analysis › Five Objectives of Website Copy, http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/answer.py?answer=77130, Retrieved 22 September 2010.