L&S Unscripted

There’s nothing tricky about writing copy for web sites. Generally speaking, if real people love your site so will search engines. Here are a few tips for writing user- and search-friendly web copy:

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Example 1: “Vinnie’s Vegetables offers ripe, glorious vegetables of all varieties: carrots, celery, radishes, rutabaga, red peppers, green peppers, yellow peppers, onions, garlic, zucchini, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, bok choy, eggplant, squash, green peas, sweet peas, snow peas, brussels sprouts, collard greens, green beans, spinach, red potatoes, new potatoes, Yukon gold potatoes, russet potatoes and yams. Our vegetables are grown “clean and green”. For more Vinnie’s Vegetables click here.”

Example 2: “Vinnie’s Vegetables offers fresh, organic produce year-round. Our pesticide-free vegetables are grown locally – no shipping means a lower cost and greener living for our customers. Sign up for our email newsletter to get ‘Vegetable of the Week’ updates.”

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1. Use keywords when contextually appropriate, but stuffing is for turkeys. You can’t trick search engines into looking at your page, and you’ll probably scare away visitors if you try. Instead of a long, boring keyword list of products/services (like in Example 1), be upfront about the best attributes of your company. If you hook a visitor on merit, they’ll dig deeper for details.

2. Think like your potential customers. Use keywords a visitor might type into a Google search. Instead of vague phrases like “grown clean and green”, try “green lifestyle” and “organic produce”. Also avoid industry-speak if your audience is the general public. If you aren’t sure what people search for, ask your mom (or spouse or kid) what they would type into a search engine to find your product. Their answers might surprise you.

3. Link internally from keywords. In Example 1, “click here” isn’t doing Vinnie any favors with the search engines. It takes up unnecessary space and makes navigating less seamless for visitors. Also, make sure the words you link from make sense with your destination. In Example 1, “offers” isn’t a clear link – is it an order form? Special offers? Good internal links should forge clear paths to more information.

Even with good-quality, succinct copy on your pages, search engines will still look for the most relevant site overall. So in addition to good copy on each page, give visitors a reason to dig around and come back again. Throughout the site, have lots of fresh, thorough content and calls to action (order a brochure, sign up for our email newsletter, etc.).

Search engines (primarily Google and Yahoo) consistently refer 30-60% of our clients’ web traffic. People are searching for your product or service – the only question is: can they find you? Have you often wondered how to gain that highly sought-after position in the search engine results pages when people type a key phrase that’s applicable to your line of business? The path to success is search engine marketing and I’ll begin by defining the two sides of the equation:

• SEO: search engine optimization; work performed behind the scenes to best optimize your web site for top search engine positions (ranking). Example: the top organic (non-paid) positions on Google or Yahoo for a particular search term.
• PPC: pay-per-click marketing; paid text ads placed in the “sponsored listings” area on search engines. Normally the top 2-3 listings on the search results page and the right column of listings.

We hear the question all the time – if we’re working to optimize our web site for search engines (SEO), why do we need to invest in a pay-per-click marketing campaign? In most cases, we recommend both and our clients who aggressively pursue the online marketing landscape use both. I once heard an analogy that it’s similar to advertising in the yellow pages. There’s a huge advantage to acquiring both positions. Considerations:

Time:

• Short-term solution: PPC, the fastest way to drive traffic to your web site. You build the campaign, take it live and within an hour, you could be appearing at the top of the paid listings on Google, Yahoo or MSN for your selected keywords. PPC is also a great avenue to test keywords, ad copy response and landing page effectiveness.
• Long-term solution: SEO is a process, not a project. The time spent optimizing your web site copy, image tags and META data will have a positive long term result, but you have to be patient and often, even the best SEO work takes a couple months to show a true increase in rankings.

Cost:

• PPC is a great online advertising medium because you only pay for clicks that actually land on your web page. Therefore, if your web site is well built and guides the user to the desired conversion (sale, information request or particular web activity), it is a very effective way to gain new traffic to your web site. The best part is that PPC is entirely measurable – an exact ROI can be produced for every dollar spent.
• SEO is often referred to as “free” as once you gain a ranking, you don’t pay for clicks on the search engine listings. However, SEO as a process is not free. It requires constant effort, diligently keeping up with new tactics and modifying the web site code accordingly.

Bottom line:

Search engine marketing is a highly effective, efficient online marketing tactic and it consistently produces the lowest cost-per-lead for our clients when compared to other online marketing campaign components. Once you launch your search engine marketing campaign, you’ll want to assess both types of traffic, organic and paid, to identify the quality of both sources of web traffic and adjust your campaign accordingly.

Get in the game,

Robin