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How To Create Good Copywriting For Conversions: Creating the Copy

Matt Tuens — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:46:02 +0000

In Part 1 of our series on Creating Good Copywriting For Conversions, we covered using stats and analytics to research and guide your efforts. In Part 2 we break down steps you can follow to help you develop a personal procedure to create effective copywriting.

You have gone to a lot of trouble to get the right kind of people to your website. You now face the task of informing and persuading them well enough to turn them from a temporary visitor into a customer. Creating the content to do so may take a few minutes or it may take much longer, and you need to cast as wide a net as possible without overreaching. Your goal: Convey a message, primarily with words but not exclusively, that will turn both impulse buyers and discerning shoppers into new (and loyal) customers.

There are copy and conversion experts all over the virtual (and real) landscape, and plenty of good opinions and ideas. Still, the best lessons are from the real world, from approaches that have worked and are working today, rather than a PowerPoint slide or a white paper. You need to accomplish – without the benefit of body language, eye contact or other in-person persuasive techniques – the same thing that a good salesperson accomplishes in a store or any other person-to-person encounter: give the visitor the useful and helpful information they want to help turn them into a buyer.

Persuade and motivate

Think of yourself as a salesman writing copy, not a copywriter making sales. For your website content you have a very simple objective. You want to persuade and motivate. Persuade the readers that your product or service uniquely, distinctively fulfills their practical needs and emotional desires, and motivate them to take the action you want. Naturally there are various approaches, from informational to "hard sell,” but the goal remains the same. Persuade and motivate.

Before you start to write, go through a thorough preparatory regimen. You need to get in the right frame of mind, first of all, and then you must "arm yourself" with the right tools. Besides setting yourself up for efficient copywriting – with your dictionary and thesaurus and perhaps a strong cup of coffee – you need to wrap your head around the project with some strategic thinking.

Before you write

You just can’t sit down, cold, and dash off the first clever things that come to your mind. That can work for slogan writing or comedy sketches, but your task is a serious, targeted one. You have to do your research first, defining the product in straightforward terms and finding a way to communicate both features and benefits to potential buyers in a quick, clean fashion. If you don’t know the product or service well, don’t even think of writing yet. Talk to users if you need to. Evaluate the item as a consumer would. Put yourself in their shoes.

You also need to position the product, both broadly and narrowly, in relation to similar ones. Compare features and benefits and note what makes your product a better one than its competitors. This will help you to define your particular target market (or markets). The strategic thinking you do in your positioning and target market planning will help you tailor your copy to the real-world taste and style of the readers. Are they students, software engineers, or 60+ year-old seniors? Stay-at-home moms, penny-pinching business owners, fashion-conscious young women? Think in terms of your demographics and their specific needs.

Preparing to write

Going through the preceding steps should have resulted in your developing a marketing strategy. Based on your knowledge of the target demographics, you should be able to determine whether to use an informational approach, try "assumptive close" methods, go the hard-sell route, or combine a few different techniques into a customized "hybrid." Of course, you can also use a sequence of different approaches, although that takes a little finesse.

It can be somewhat difficult to reach a decision on the precise length of the copy. Don’t write more words than you need to add “heft” – people don’t have time to waste and fluff makes you look bad – but if you need 500 words to sell the product or service, write 500. But less is more – use as few words as necessary to get your point across. Vigorous writing is concise. Conveying points efficiently displays intelligence and mastery of the subject or industry, increasing trust and faith that you are the best choice.

From the very start, remember that you have to reach people not just in their heads but their hearts, too, and even their souls if it makes sense to do so. Every action/purchase is emotional on some level. You need to connect with the readers and make it both safe and necessary for them to become buyers.

Writing the copy

Don’t forget the overarching goal – persuade and motivate. You are not writing an op-ed for the paper or an essay for a class. Use your most natural, unaffected voice, and don’t use "two-dollar" words just to impress rather than communicate. Do not write in the passive voice, either. Stay active, use action words, and maintain a good pace without bogging down in detail or detours.

Do not embellish, make false claims, or invent facts or figures. Always be truthful while emphasizing your strong selling points. Stay with demonstrable facts, and be specific with them, too. For instance, don’t say your auto air filters work with "most American cars," tell the reader they work with " GM, Ford and Chrysler products."

Keep going forward

When you are organized and prepared to write, things should flow well, and only in one direction, forward. Every paragraph should proceed logically from the first sentence to the appropriate conclusion. Don’t clumsily refer back to a preceding paragraph when repeating a point, just simply repeat the statement if it’s important enough to bring up again. Go forward, and take the reader with you.

In fact, you should not be hesitant to repeat yourself. This is one of the easiest, most direct ways to get the reader to remember what you want them to remember. Don’t be afraid to do this when it seems the right thing to do. One good technique is to take the good, repeatable selling point and couch it in different ways to reach people in their minds as well as their emotions. In other words, repeat the point but approach the reader from different angles with it. The emotional connection is key. Never forget that.

Clarity and depth

Stylistically, you will want to avoid long sentences and complicated structures. You don’t need semi-colons, double dashes and parenthetical phrases. Nice, direct, declaratory sentences punctuated with commas and periods will do nicely. Be yourself, too. If you are not funny, don’t try using humor. Your goal is to persuade and motivate, not get people to laugh or like you. Plus, you may come off as disingenuous.

The "depth" of your message means many things, and not just editorial. The page design itself can be key in your copy challenge, so always be prepared to do a new design to accompany new writing. Don’t let your design be a hurdle to getting your message across. The pages in your site are there to grab the reader and not let go, so use all the graphic and editorial techniques available to do that. You can draw in the reader with graphic shapes pointing them where you want them to go just as easily as you can use well-traveled attention-grabbing terms like "Free" or "Stop".

From interest to action

Whatever methods you use, you want to move your reader along. You have their attention, so deliver on the promise. Don’t get ahead of yourself and dive in to YOUR product or YOUR business or YOUR autobiography. It’s not you that most people are interested in. It’s how you can help their own current interest, which usually revolves around themselves.

Now comes the next step, which means motivating the readers to take whatever action you desire. Give them the facts, describe the features and then concentrate on the personal benefits, both practical and emotional. The readers are actually looking for, and hoping to find, reasons to buy the product or service you offer. If the product is going to save them some money, say so, and be specific about how it will do so. If it will save them time, say that. Saving money and time are not just practical but also emotional needs. If your products will make people feel a certain way, appear a certain way or be appreciated by others, feed into that emotional desire and run down those particular benefits. And do it all in regular, person-to-person vocabulary, without sales-y terms like "mega" or "super" or "incredible."

The call to action

You are ideally leading a reader on a short, sweet, helpful journey. You have to tell them what you expect them to do when they reach the destination, whether it’s a form or a link or a "Buy" button. Even if the goal is to have them sign up for your newsletter that still requires the same "persuade and motivate" copy that any other sale does. Whatever you do, make the call to action a prominent one (even use multiple calls to action so visitors can take action from several places). Never put obstacles in the way of visitors who want to become buyers. Don’t distract them, and don’t make them have to search for what to do.

When you think you’re finished writing, you’re not. You have simply finished that phase. You have revisions to make now and editing to do. Carve the message down to its basics and get rid of fluff. Then do it again. When you finish a few rounds of rewriting and refining, read the copy out loud and listen to how it flows. Make sure your voice and your tone are consistent throughout the copy, especially if you have a large site and/or you are writing copy over a period of days or weeks. Review your work one last time before you post it, and ensure that it is reaching both the readers’ minds and emotions with the message you want them to own. The whole idea is to lead them along and have them think that they are, in fact, discovering you, not the other way around.

How To Create Good Copywriting For Conversions

Matt Tuens — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:58:09 +0000

In the next three articles in our series on Using Copywriting for Better SEO and Marketing we will look at how content increases conversions. Each article will focus on a different aspect of improving conversion: stats, content creation, and testing new content. This first article covers the basics of stats and analytics.

SEO has a crucial role in the success of your Internet venture, but SEO by itself is not the "be all and end all" or only factor in that success (– gasp – the SEO said what??). SEO is an absolute must, but increased rankings and drawing more visitors is only the beginning…

…Now that you have people where you want them, how do you get them to do what you want them to do? How do maximize conversions, turning more visitors into actions?

The plain truth is that it is not any one thing. What you really want to understand and analyze is how well all the various page factors work together to create conversions. Once you see how all the factors work independently and interdependently, you will better see how (and what) tweaks of each can increase your success.

There are the variables you can measure more easily: numbers of visitors, where they come from, where they go, how many pages they view, how long they view each page, etc. But then there are the ones that can remain inscrutable and hard to quantify: the architecture and design of your site and pages, the value of your graphics – and the things about your copywriting that convince people to click through and buy.

When considering how to increase sales from your traffic, you are generally thinking in terms of conversion optimization. To increase conversions you must have a clear understanding of what your site visitors are actually doing – this you can get from statistics. But you also need to see your site from their perspective – this will tell you what those stats are reflecting. Only after you view your site through the eyes of a visitor can you fully assess what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Then you will have a clearer picture of how to increase those conversions.

What to look for

Your stats are going to be different than anyone else’s, just like the various challenges you face. As you get deeper into your stats and analysis you will discover that certain aspects are more important than others for your specific situation. However, there are some common factors that must be considered by every site owner/operator. A few of those universally applicable measurements that just about everyone should be looking at are:

Keywords: You may know how your site ranks, but to discover what that really means and use it to your continuing advantage you need to dig a bit deeper. Good, easy to digest keyword stats can tell you just how much traffic specific keyword rankings are actually producing. This will both tell you what keywords are the most valuable and expose opportunities for improvement.

Visitors: Naturally you need to know the number of unique (and repeat) visitors you get over a certain period of time, and of course you want to increase it. Unique visitors by itself will not directly assist you to increase conversions, but it is valuable in showing how your rankings and inbound links affect the amount and nature of your traffic. Repeat visitor statistics on the other hand can help increase conversions. For one, return visitors may be returning to buy from you, so their actions and how you are converting them are to be greatly analyzed. Secondly, sites with better content naturally engender a greater visitor return rate due to visitors returning for more good information. People usually don’t just do a search and buy from the first site they land on, they typically visit a number of sites. When they are ready to buy, they often return to the site that gave them the most helpful information. Use your content to turn them into buyers when they come back.

Referrers: Where your traffic comes from is also key. How much traffic is coming from the search engines vs. inbound links vs. ads? Which search engines are sending you the most? These kinds of figures have been called "word of mouse" referrals. Which sources convert the best for you?

Exit Pages: Few statistics are as crucial as this, particularly as you work to increase conversions through the understanding, and potential manipulation of, visitor behavior. When you pin down the pages from which your visitors depart your site, you can then address one of the most serious failings of your site, its architecture, its design – and the copy. Analyze deeply and objectively – why are they leaving from this page??

You are not amassing piles of data just to have it on file. You need to assemble what you are learning in a way that you can then use to improve the copywriting for increased conversions. Don’t forget the aim of the whole exercise, and try to keep the information clear, straightforward and, therefore, usable. It’s all about making each site component the most effective it can be, and copy is among the most important ones.

Using the data you get

The stats and analytics you are developing (on a continuing basis) need to be mined in different ways to discover different things. Remember that the task before you right now is to create content that will aid in conversions. All the analyses of keywords, traffic, visitor paths, exit pages and so forth should find its way into your new, improved way of creating compelling copy.

You certainly need to check your stats regularly, though you don’t need to study them daily. A weekly review, at minimum, will be necessary to keep you abreast of what’s going on and fluctuations of where traffic is coming from, where it’s going, and whether or not your visitors are doing what you want them to do (answering the call to action).

One of the simplest way use stats to craft better copy for increasing conversions is comparing sites that do both well and poorly in your own industry. While you won’t have access to their nitty-gritty details, it is not difficult to find out the general view of their stats and who is succeeding with conversions, so comparing various approaches can give you some good direction.

There are so many variables, so much to do and keep track of, that you can easily get lost in a maze of numbers and percentages. Remember, you are working on copywriting now, so the first quality you want to study in a successful conversion setting is which copywriting approaches are working and which are not. Tone, style, presentation format, vocabulary level, and interaction with calls to action – these are all highly important variables, and require you actually to go and see sites to discern them. The other data, thankfully, can be accrued using various tools, even free ones.

Tools of the trade

Webalizer & AWstats: Your web hosting provider most likely offers some kind of free stats/analytics program, perhaps Webalizer, AWstats or something similar. Although these statistics programs are somewhat elementary and lack the in-depth information-gathering capabilities of others, they are simple and do not require special training to use. It is either difficult or impossible to customize the information you get and how you see it, but if you are new to stats (the online kind or any other) then these are a good start. The better you get, the better tools you can begin using.

Google Analytics: Called by some "the upgraded Urchin," this program gives you the information collected by Google in a simple, easy-to-read format. As opposed to some other no- and low-cost tools, Google Analytics can customize the data presentation and allows you to establish "targets" to track precisely who is landing on which specific pages. One possible downside, at least at the beginning of your optimization efforts, is that all of your own information is now displayed to Google. It may be wise to get your site "in gear" and moving up the rankings before you decide to share your own stats with the Google universe.

ClickTracks: This is the favorite of a number of analytics people because of the virtually limitless number of ways you can customize it. With its heavyweight features, such as the ability to calculate ROI and generate user-defined reports, it is a solid and valuable tool. Although it is not free, it is priced appropriately for the amount of power it affords. It would be well worth it for anyone to take a test drive with the free, trial version.

You may have to fight the urge to keep digging, keep mining, and keep generating more and more stats and reports. It can get addicting, and if you’re not careful can lead down the path toward white lab coats and mad scientist-ism. You have to balance the information gathering and analysis with taking remedial steps with the copywriting that is of core importance to your site’s business. Resist the temptation to overanalyze, and stay focused on the task at hand. One thing no tool or program can do for you is to create an efficient timeline for doing the work and recasting your site’s copy to increase conversions. You have to figure that out for yourself. Just remember, these are changes that you want to implement as soon as you can, not study to death.

Conclusion (and a new beginning)

This is the conclusion to this article only, not the conclusion to the process in which you will be continuously engaged for the duration of your site’s life. Here we may have covered all of 1 or 2% of what could be said about using statistical information to refine and empower your website copy so that it leads to more sales. Again, there are various components of your site that will participate in this effort – architecture, layout, graphics, etc. – but you want to make your copy do its job by compelling your site visitors to take the actions you want them to take.

Statistics are one essential tool, among many, to understanding how your site functions and how to make the most of that knowledge. Stats are, without question, key to maximizing your ROI from your website, and thus need to be reviewed on a continuing basis. There is a lot of help available in online articles, user forums, and the support documents that accompany the stats programs that you are (or will be) using. Still, if you run out of time or patience, or feel that you are in over your head, there are plenty of professionals, reputable and cost-effective, to help you create good copywriting to increase your conversions from on the stats you assemble about your site.

Next Week

Next week we’ll be releasing Part Four of the series: Writing For Conversions, Part 2 – Content Creation.

SEO Copywriting: How To Write For Publication

Matt Tuens — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:13:41 +0000

Many metaphors have been offered up to describe or explain the Internet, but calling it "an ocean of words" is as accurate as any other. In 1998 the first Google index counted 26 million pages, by 2000 it had reached the billion mark and by 2002 it had more than tripled again to over 3 billion. In July 2008 the company’s Web Search Infrastructure Team announced that it had counted 1 trillion unique URLs on the web at once. At an average 1000 words per page, that means the web contains an astonishing 1 quadrillion words. That’s 15 zero’s.

Obviously, writing for publication on the Internet and standing out from all the rest of the verbiage presents a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Yet web professionals know from the ever-improving metrics and analytics that certain articles and specific kinds of writing do, in fact, perform better at their assigned tasks.

And make no mistake – writing for publication means setting (and hitting) targets, not crafting a follow-up to The Great Gatsby or concocting clever rhymes. In fact, fiction and poetry together account for only some 15% of web writing, which means the overwhelming majority of articles in cyberspace are non-fiction, imparting knowledge to educate the world.

Intentions and aims of writing for publication

There are many reasons to write for publication, and the reader can be served well no matter what your motivations. You may want to "get your name out there," or that of your company, for increased exposure. You may wish to establish yourself or your firm as the leading expert in a certain field.

You can easily load up your own domains with scores of great articles, injecting them with the authority of your knowledge of your vertical. The positive side of this is the creation and positioning of your own site as the informational go-to resource for your industry. The risk is that since you are writing for your own site, no matter how good the information is people may wonder if it is self serving, and you could be perceived as essentially "blowing your own horn."

Another good option is placing an article on a popular blog, or in an e-zine that has attained a certain level of respect within a certain industry, or even in a popular print magazine. This third-party publishing can dramatically boost your perceived authority. You want to avoid appearing as a self-promoting windbag, and one way to do that is to have other sites and publications promote you instead.

Conversely, you will want to avoid certain venues, as well, to safeguard your reputation. Investigate the various "post your article" sites and avoid the ones that do not have excellent content up front, as people will generally not waste much time looking for something good on a mediocre site. For "good" content they will likely gravitate to sites they see as having "good" information.

How to stand out from the crowd of content

The overarching goal for writing web content is to be informative, entertaining, task-oriented, clear – and above all, useful to the demographic. Rankings in the search engines are a by-product of good, focused content, and should not be the goal. Frankly, it is entirely possible to serve a niche audience, and do it quite effectively with a high level of satisfaction, without setting any ranking records. But typically when you write an authoritative article full of information useful to your demographic, people will naturally cite it as good and link to it, thus helping your article move up the natural listings. Consistently write helpful, informative articles, and the effects of these citations will not just add up, they will multiply. But, again, this happens if your focus and goal is to reach and affect a target group, small or large, with well-written, concise and usable information.

Most people think of fiction when they hear the term "creative writing," but writers know very well that writing for publication on non-fiction topics requires tremendous creativity. You do not simply "do research" in preparation for writing an article. Rather, you immerse yourself in the subject, study it from all possible angles, take it apart to understand how it truly works, then put it back together again and explain it to others in your own, unique way. The first step (of many) in learning to write content that reads well is "owning the topic" – knowing the subject inside and out. There is no other way to write with authority than to have, in fact, that authority.

Reaching the reader

Just as important as knowing the subject matter is knowing your audience. Not only do you have to understand the target reader’s point of view, of course, but you also need to speak in a common vocabulary. Equally as important as the content is the tone in which it is presented. A motivated reader, eager to learn, does not respond particularly well to condescension, and certainly does not want to be "talked at" or scolded.

In addition to speaking in their vocabulary, you have to choose the words that will motivate them to the goal of the article. Want them to walk away with knowledge that will help them? Choose language that will intrigue them to read more, and word your concepts so their brains soak them up like a sponge. Want them to buy something? Choose words and language that will elicit the emotional buying response. If you want to accomplish your goal, you not only have to use language they will understand, you also have to use language they will connect to.

In a sense, the reader should feel that you are working with them, approaching the material together. This is one of the most powerful ways to get the reader "invested" in the article and lead them, without seeming to, toward any possible call to action you might have at the conclusion.

You will find that you need to write various articles for various purposes, and although you may develop an identifiable style, on a practical level your writing will be meant to accomplish different things at different times. If you are writing to entertain, then keep it light and fun, and don’t lecture. If you are writing to educate, don’t bother with a "Sunday magazine feature" story introduction, but get right to the lessons. However, whether it’s for fun or for some other goal, being informative is not a side effect or a bonus – it is the very foundation of your writing.

The ultimate aims of publishing your writing

With the information you impart, you are seeking to change what readers think or how they perceive something. For the reader, it should be a journey, a process of discovery that proceeds deliberately and convincingly. Columbus did not make any side trips on the way to the New World, and you must avoid the temptation to digress, embellish or confuse matters. Do not pile on words, especially of the "10¢ variety," in an attempt to impress (or increase arbitrary word count). Persuasive writing is lean without being mean, vigorous without being aggressive, concise without being dry and informative without being a mere list of factoids.

Yes, there is a lot to crafting a persuasive piece of writing for publication. It is both art and craft, requiring both creativity and skill. Every word must earn its place, do its job and contribute to the overall effect and meaning, or it should be deleted. If you can say a lot with a little, do so. Vigorous writing is concise. If you have done your best and still have a long article, just ensure the reader comes away with copious amounts of usable information.

Read and consider all feedback you get on your writing, as the only definition of success that counts is the reader reaction. The more you write, the better you will become, if you pay attention to what your audiences are telling you. Writing is a process, not a product, and is a tool for you as regards your business endeavors.

A note to non-writers

Even if you don’t write yourself, you should know how to assess writers who are working for you, since their output will represent you and your firm to the world. In fact, in this day and age, work-for-hire arrangements may result in your putting your name on an article you paid someone to write. This makes quality control even more important.

Next Week

Next week we’ll be releasing Part Two of the series – Writing For Search Engines.

Save Your Copy From A Rewrite

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:45:45 +0000

One search industry professional considers rewriting copy a last resort, a step that should be undertaken after other business-boosting efforts fail.

Change can be good, except for times when it isn’t. Some site publishers may want changes in the words they present to visitors, but it may be in their best interest to convince them to stay the course.

Karon Thackston at Marketing Words had some thoughts on the topic. In the context of a discussion with a client who continually asked for copy changes, Thackston recounted how keeping existing copy intact really was working for the client:

My question to her was always,

Tighten Your Copy Or Lose Your Visitors

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:48:05 +0000

If you’re spending plenty of money and time on marketing and advertising, be wary of landing pages that veer into undue verbosity.

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" -- Ernest Hemingway on big word guy William Faulkner.

Big emotions come from little words. Spend some time attending the many June weddings taking place in a few weeks, and see how much emotion surrounds the words, ‘I do’.

While you don’t have to turn your copywriting staff into a bunch of cat-loving, bullfighting Hemingway clones, it may be best to ensure your landing page copy arrives in tight, readable form.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen cited recent research into how Internet users read little of what they see. The summary should serve as a short, sharp shock to those whose prose tacks toward the verbose:

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

In the study, the authors instrumented 25 users’ browsers and recorded extended information about everything they did as they went about their normal Web activities. What’s important about this study is that it was completely naturalistic: the users didn’t have to do anything special.

They found the budding Faulkners of the web gained little in-depth attention. After cleaning up the researchers’ dataset, Nielsen found on an average visit that “users read half the information only on those pages with 111 words or less.”

Out of that hundred-plus words, you might be getting 50 across to the visitor. That’s not just a short attention span, it’s a veritable eyeblink. “If you target a broader audience or have sales cycles that are shorter than 5 years, you’d be wise to put your word count on a strict diet,” said Nielsen.

Save ‘The Sound and the Fury’ for your reading list, rather than your site copy. Visitors are coming for the facts, delivered in some tasty, effective “bytes.”

The Importance of SEO Copy Writing to High Rankings

Sally Falkow — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:53:07 +0000

In this MSNBC interview the Snr. V.P. of Network Solutions covers what any business needs for page one search rankings.

Content is definitely king. Stephanie suggests writing articles about your product or service as one of the best ways to add good content. SEO copy writing will not only produce content that is written for the search engines, but also information that gets responses from your visitors. She points out that articles online give you the opportunity to educate your public about your products and services.

The next thing you need is links. One strategy Stephanie did not cover was using RSS feeds to syndicate your content If you have someone who does SEO writing you can add links on the keywords in the articles. When your article get picked up and republished in blogs or other websites those links lead traffic back to you..

She mentions meta tags – another important part of SEO copywriting services. Meta tags are the technical text using the right keywords that get progammed into the page, making it possible for a search engine to find your site when a search is done.

SEO is vital for any business. Good content based on keyword research, built-in links on those keywords in the text and syndicated articles should be the stock-in-trade of a good SEO copywriter. It’s a proven strategy that produces high search ranking every time..

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Product Details Encourage Site Visitors To Stay

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:22:40 +0000

The importance of authoritative content on websites becomes even more critical to site publishers during the holiday season.

Useful information discovered by consumers during their online browsing may be the key to keeping them as converting customers.

Site publishers have known of the necessity of quality content for their websites for some time. Without it, people will skip away to another destination as quickly as they can hit the Back button.

Webmasters who haven’t picked up on this trend as a reason to drive improved copy for their sites should note the recent survey by web marketing syndicator WebCollage. Their 2007 Survey of Online Consumer Product Research Habits found that people want complete product information.

When it isn’t present, those visitors tend to go in search of a site that does have it available. The survey found that two-thirds of respondents considered detailed product benefits and capabilities as the most useful information they can find online.

Some 37 percent of frustrated visitors will go to a competing retail site to find the details they want. 55 percent will head to a manufacturer’s site, as they believe the best product information about an item will be there.

Sites that run as small operations may not have the staff needed to obtain the best information and write it up as product copy. But the investment in that effort may pay off in better conversions and repeat customers.

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SES: SEO Copywriting

Doug Caverly — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:31:04 +0000

In day-to-day life, a person needn’t be Shakespeare to get his (or her) point across in writing.

As a matter of fact, it’s probably easier if a person isn’t Shakespeare. But when writing for search engines, communication can be a little trickier, and so a session at SES San Jose highlighted some tips and strategies.

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Heather Lloyd-Martin, the president and CEO of SuccessWorks, gave a presentation, and one of her main points was that unoriginal content is bad. Want proof? She pointed out an instance in which duplicate content got AmsterdamEscape.com banned from Google. Also, if your “[c]opy comes straight from the manufacturer (or the box, or the packaging…) . . . . [u]nless you are a big brand with lots o’ links, chances are that your copy will not position.”

So adjust product descriptions such that they focus on keyword phrases.

Aim for around 250 words per page, and be sure to have eye-catching, look-at-me titles.

Furthermore, as a “secret Google hint,” Lloyd-Martin recommends that you “[p]lace benefit statements near your main keyphrases. When Google takes a snippet for the SERP page, your description will boost your benefits.”

And perhaps most importantly, try to handle these matters in a way that won’t take tons of time and money.

In an example involving Mrs. Fields Cookies, Lloyd-Martin advised the company not to “pull down [its] site and rewrite every page and its Title for the search engines.”

The final point of the presentation: “Good writing can SAVE and MAKE you money.”

Consumers Taking 34 Hours to Convert

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:43:49 +0000

MarketingSherpa reports that on average consumers are taking 34 hours from click to conversion. That’s up from 19 hours—180% as long as their original study in 2005 indicated. The full report on time to conversion is expected tomorrow from ScanAlert.

As MarketingSherpa President Anne Holland noted, this finding indicates how important it is for marketers to mearsure longer conversion cycles than just click-buy.

Noting that every page is a landing page these days, MarketingSherpa also offered four suggestions to improve the conversion cycle:

Add “About Us” blurbs to every conceivable entry point

Grab emails early on — before the shopping cart

Content: give more product info than the competition does

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Oddly enough, some of these suggestions contravene conventional landing page advice, especially #1. Just today, the Copywriting Maven (writing on Copyblogger) did a copywriting makeover on SEOmoz’s Premium Membership page. Her first recommendation?

1. Remove all the extraneous material from the most valuable real estate on your landing page – the area “above the fold”, the visitor’s first screen view.

Eliminate all the sign-ins, search and navigational links. They are all reasons and exits from the landing page and your message.

(I do have to insert here that I’m such a such a spelling stickler that putting a capital ‘M’ in SEOmoz probably bugs me more than it does Rand Fishkin.)

Who’s right?

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Is Your Copy Award-winning?

Mike Moran — Wed, 16 May 2007 14:30:38 +0000

Those of you who have followed this blog for any length of time know that I care a lot about copywriting. Good copy is crucial for getting your site found and for getting customers to buy. But most of us, in private moments, might admit that we don’t spend as much time crafting our copy as we should. Are you ready to put yours to the test?

For those of you that are unenthusiastic about tweaking your copy, let’s review why it is so important:

It gets your site found. Using the right words gets your site ranked for your preferred keywords in organic search marketing. But writing the right stories also gets subscribers to your blog and gets links to your Web pages. The right story with the right words gets you found—that is all about your copy.

It gets your products bought. Any direct marketer knows that the right copy makes the sale. If your offer is right, and the words are right, then customers will buy. That is what direct mail and catalogs have depended on for years—the Web works the same way. Often, your copy makes all the difference.

OK, so now that you might be more interested, are you ready to see how your copy stacks up? If so, check out this copywriting contest. Submit your best copy efforts and get a chance to win. If nothing else, the mere effort of entering a contest will get you to focus on your copy more than usual—maybe that will take your offers to the next level. Good luck.

Hat tip to Seth Godin

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