Owning a website puts you into the publishing business via a worldwide distribution system where your authored content gets ‘published’ for all to see.
A website will not be a great business asset unless you can master the challenge of how to author & publish great content. If you are a butcher or baker or candlestick maker – or doctor or lawyer or business chief you are good at your core competency, but not necessarily trained as a copy writer & publisher. How do you create & present great content? Here are some content & publication best practices to help you:
Each page on your website should have a specific purpose for your business. Think of the purpose of each page as being a discussion topic. Then express your thoughts just like you were telling a prospect you just met about each topic.
So-called landing pages are important pages people ‘land on’ after doing a Google Search; clicking on a link to your site from an ad or referral website; or after typing in a specific URL address for your website. Depending on the personality of the user, you have between 2 and 8 seconds to ‘hook’ the visitor into exploring your website beyond the landing page.
Your Home Page is often the landing page people arrive at. The Home Page content should be like your ”elevator speech” that you use at networking events.
A Home Page has some information that needs to be there and some things that should not be there. The Home Page is not the ‘About Us’ page. The Home Page is not where you put your biography or business history. Just like a good elevator speech, the home page content should emphasize your company’s value to customers, not all about you. Here is a Home Page check list:
- Identify the business purpose of your company and its value from a customer’s prospective – what’s in it for them to look around your website?
- Indicate how your company benefits your customers. What P_A_I_N issues can you solve for your customers in the website? Problems / Anxieties / Interests / Needs
- Define Target Customer Profiles – make it clear who your website is aimed at serving. Target market analysis usually results in identifying 3 to 5 top level customer personas. Make sure targeted visitors can identify with at least one persona and use that association to funnel them deeper into your website with a contextual hyperlink to an inner web page with a topic specific to that visitor’s core interest.
- List your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) – why should a customer do business with you? What do you do that no one else can do or what do you do better than your competition?
- Provide a call to action and consider an incentive. Calls to action are invitations to do something with a clear pathway resulting in lead nurturing opportunities or a sale – i.e. a phone call, email, subscription form, or online purchase, etc. An incentive can be something as simple as offering a newsletter, whitepaper, free consultation, or discount offer. You need to engage & entice visitors into doing something of value to you otherwise why have a website?
- Always provide easy to find contact information – phone number, contact form link, business address, social network linkages, etc to make it easy for users to contact or find you.
There are a lot of other aspects to becoming a great online publisher, but if you start with the above basics you will be off to a good start. We offer advanced publishing methods called Content Marketing. Contact Me to learn more.
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This post is the third in a row about website content marketing / online merchandising strategies and continues the discussion about website conversion architecture.
When a visitor arrives at your website, you must immediately ‘join the conversation already going on in their head’. You do that on the landing page by analyzing the likely core motivation of target customer groups (called profiling) and providing visual aid links to a web page with information specific to each profile (called funneling - see the prior post).
What’s next? Here is the rest of the story. The keys to conversion architecture are:
- Immediate Clarity of Your Message (Clarity trumps Persuasion)
- Visitor’s Sightpath
- Communicating Your Organization’s Unique Selling Points
- Transition to ‘Sales’ w/ Trust & Credibility
- Calls to Action – the Payoff, the ‘Sale’
Message Clarity – Your home page content is especially crucial. Along with profiling / funneling you must reassure a visitor that they came to the right place for what they need. Your ‘website purpose’ message must be easy to understand – clarity trumps persuasion. You have a very few seconds to make a first impression. You are a few clicks away from a sale or one click away from them leaving your site and going to your competitors.
Studies show that 1/3 of visitors will not scroll down a home page – if they don’t see what they want ‘above the fold’ they leave. So place engaging content at the top and be brief. The home page is not where you throw up all over a visitor everything you know about your business. Nor is the home page the place to launch into an about me ramble. The home page should be about the visitor’s needs, not about you.
Visitor’s sight path -In the western world we read from left to right and top to bottom. That fact has implications about where you strategically place content on any web page. Studies of website visitors using eye tracking heatmap technology reveals clear patterns of eye movement online:
This eye tracking behavior is very uniform among most users and suggests the following page layout strategy to maximize content effectiveness:
Your Unique Selling Points (USP) - Your top (3 at most) USP’s should appear on the home page & other strategic locations in bullet format or in the form of a memorable tag line. USP attributes:
- Your unique selling points must be true and you must be able to deliver on what you promise
- Your unique selling points must separate you from your competitors – either they do not offer this benefit, or do not do it as well as you do
- Your unique selling points must be valued by your target customers as something they want or need
USP examples: McDonalds = fast, consistent everywhere, cheap food / Subway = healthy fast food / Culvers = quality fast food made fresh.
Transition to sales - After funneling target customers based upon their profiles, the inner website pages’ content becomes the important transition to sales. Use this content formula:
- Show that you understand the user’s problems & pain
- Present user benefits first
- Present your products & services features last
- Use ‘header tags’ for informative headlines
- Important text should be readable by scanning – use bullet points
- If extensive details are needed, use links to down-loadable documents or to a sub-page dedicated to the details
Other important interior page tid-bits:
- Average visitor time spent on an interior page = 45 seconds
- Text should be written at 8th grade level for a general audience or to target audience level for specialized topics
- Average number of scrolls on an interior page = 1.3 scrolls (total of 2.3 screen views at 1024X768)
Calls to Action (the payoff) -Sales are lost daily because the salesperson does not ask the customer for the sale. The same is true in websites – your text and calls-to-action are your online salesperson.
If you want a customer to take a type of action, then you must explicitly tell them to take that action and clearly show them how to take that action. Otherwise you are leaving things to chance. This must be done on every page of the website or you are wasting opportunities.
Calls to action are things like: sale items, incentives, subscriptions, call now, email me, limited time offers, etc, etc. And remember that not all visitors are ready to buy now. So offer engagement & nurturing actions like blogs, wikis, forums, social media links for networking, newsletters, etc, etc.
Summary -
- Understand who your customers are and what their motivation is about – profile into groups accordingly
- Funnel each profile group to an inner page specific to their motivation
- Market directly to the needs or problems of each profile group
- Give them an offer they can’t refuse
- Tell them & show them how to take action
- Engage the not yet ready to take action
This was a long post, but it only scratched the surface about the topic of website conversion architecture. Contact me to discuss a site evaluation to improve your website’s conversion rate. (Hint – that is a call to action)
Tags: Conversion Marketing, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Website Conversion Architecture
In search engine PPC advertising, you bid on the cost per click for keywords via a silent auction format for the right to have your ad show up in a higher position for searches of those keywords in the Sponsored Link area of search engine result pages.
What happens if Company A bids on a keyword in the form of the name of Competitor Company B for the purpose of directing prospects to Company A’s website – a sort of brand hi-jacking? A high profile example of brand hi-jacking was publicized yesterday in my state. Law Firm A bid on Law Firm B’s company name (the usual series of the partners’ last names) as a keyword phrase in Google for the purpose of directing Internet traffic to Law Firm A’s website.
Was this a smart or dumb business decision by Law Firm A? Was it legal or illegal? Was it sleazy or just a sign of the times? First of all, this is not a new situation; it has been going on between competitors for many years. Lawsuits have been filed against search engines and occasionally the advertiser primarily based on trademark laws.
What makes the above case different is Law Firm B is suing Law Firm A based on state privacy law contending that “Defendants’ obtaining and using the keywords (plaintiff’s company name) is an intentional and illegal effort to trade on the hard-earned names, personal reputations and good will of the plaintiffs”. What follows is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer. And even if a search engine allows it, that does not mean you can not be sued.
Yellow Pages’ advertising has and will continue to migrate to the Internet and the disputes will follow. Search Engines are the ’new yellow pages’. Many have tried to sue search engines for allowing brand hi-jacking but with little or no results.
Each search engine has their own fluid criteria for allowing bids on another company’s name based on things like; recent court decisons in various countries; is the name tradmarked; are you an affiliate; are you using the name in a just generic manner, etc, etc. You need to check on the current restrictions of each search engine publisher before deciding to use this PPC tactic.
BUT…. what seems to be a clear legal area is: You can not use another company’s trademarked name or brand, if you have no affiliation with them, in your actual ad copy or in your website content or related marketing collateral without getting black-balled by search engines and/or sued. So you may be able to bid on a competitor’s name as a keyword (a behind the scenes activity), but not use trademark material in your PPC ad or website.
If Law Firm B prevails over Law Firm A based on privacy laws; if potential clients of Law Firm A are turned off by the practice; or if the Legal Association bans the practice as unethical is yet to be determined. In the meantime, prospects that search using Law Firm B’s name could be landing on Law Firm A’s website.
Tags: Add new tag, Digital Marketing, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click ads, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, Search Marketing
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I am often asked if SEO can be successfully done on a do-it-yourself (DIY) basis or is a professional SEO expert needed?
My answer is yes, no, or maybe depending on the circumstances. If the web page theme being optimized is very competitive I lean towards saying no to DIY. If the web page theme being optimized is a highly specialized niche with few competing pages, I lean towards saying yes for DIY.
The other factor is how well educated the the DIYer is about SEO or how much effort they will put into becoming educated. Most DIYers go down a path of a few hours of random, unreliable SEO fact-gathering that they like to call “research”.
If you Google “SEO facts” you will see there are 9+ million web pages claiming to offer facts on the subject. Good luck sorting that out in a couple of hours. I have been doing SEO for 5 years and I am still learning and adapting to the ever-changing tactics needed.
DIY SEO is a little like DIY tax preparation. If your tax situation is simple, then DIY. If your situation is complex but you are willing to wade through the endless pages of tax code, then maybe DIY is OK for you. But if not, then for best results and peace of mind a tax expert is best.
It’s the same with SEO. If you have an easy path or are willing to climb a steep learning curve then go for DIY; otherwise find a pro.
Tags: Add new tag, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Marketing, SEO
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How competitive is SEO? Type any word into Google search. When the results arrive look in the upper right corner just above the Sponsored Links. It will say ‘Results 1 – 10 of XXXXXXXX for your word’.
I typed in golf and found 310,000,000 web pages used the word golf. If you have a page about golf, you compete against those 310 million other pages for page #1 in Google.
Impossible to win you say? I say, difficult, but not impossible. You need to understand the game. First of all, not all those pages are a direct competitor. There are news stories. Some are eCom pages selling golf shoes; if you don’t sell golf shoes on your page there is no competitive issue. But a percentage of the ‘golf’ pages are competitors.
The way to get to page #1 in Google is by having a niche page for each item about golf you want to promote. The more specific the golf topic the better. Then you need to do all of the SEO on-page and off-page things that Google looks for in their algorithim. Because most web masters aren’t specific enough on each page, and don’t do all the right SEO things, you will be amazed to learn you can reach page #1 in Google if you do the right things; even when you are competing against 310 million pages.
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