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Published June 13th, 2007
in Copywriting and Marketing.
A recent study by the Kelsey Group confirms what most of us already know, but all too rarely think about: Seventy percent of all U.S. households now use the internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.
As America’s leading provider of market research and analysis to publishers of Yellow Pages, electronic directories and other local print media, the Kelsey Group knows as much about local buying trends as any research organization anywhere. Among other things, they use daily consumer surveys and statistical analysis to evaluate business, social, economic and technology trends that are changing local markets and forecast how those trends will effect local and regional businesses.
So when the Kelsey Group says that small businesses without a web presence are at a serious competitive disadvantage in today’s shopping environment, you can take that opinion to the bank.
The fact that consumers in 70 percent of American homes are now using the web to research products and services they intend to purchase locally, also puts a tremendous pressure on local and small-business websites of all types to increase both the size and, most especially, the quality of their online presence. Think about it for a moment. If you’re a local businessperson with a sporting goods, apparel, toy, drug, consumer electronics, or any one of a dozen other types of stores, you’re not only competing fang and claw with WalMart, Kmart and Target in the brick-and-mortar environment, you’re also going head to head with them online.
If a consumer in Your Town USA likes Walmart.com better than he or she likes YourSite.com, they’re more likely to get in the car and go to Walmart to make their purchase than they are to visit your store.
Fortunately, there’s good news as well as bad in the Kelsey Group report.
Let’s read Kelsey’s conclusion again. Carefully.
Seventy percent of all U.S. households now use the internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.
Long about the middle of that sentence we see two crucial words: Information source.
That 70 percent isn’t necessarily using the web to decide where to buy products. In a vast number of cases they’re using the web, to get information on what to buy and why product A will work better for them than product B.
Fortunately for small-business entrepreneurs, big-box store websites generally do a fairly miserable job of providing any information beyond the barebones descriptions printed on product boxes. And they provide absolutely zero information that will help anyone except totally generic consumers decide what to buy.
Two quick examples: Neither Walmart.com nor Homedepot.com offers any real guidance to help people decide which of the many snow blowers they offer is best suited for dry, dusty Montana snow and which aren’t terribly good on powder but are excellent for the heavy, wet snow common on the East Coast.
Staying with seasonal products, some air conditioners are engineered to give peak performance in hot desert climates; others work best in hot, humid conditions. National chain websites don’t tell consumers which is which, local appliance store sites can — and should. Though it may not be immediately apparent, the fact that a huge number of local consumers are turning to the web for information is of incredible benefit to savvy local businesspersons competing with big chains.
What keeps local TV and appliance vendors, for example, in business when the same products are available in big box stores for less money? Nine times out of ten, there’s two one-word answers to that question: Expertise and service.
Some chains, think Circuit City and Best Buy, do make an effort to have their “sales” people memorize a line of technological patter about the various products they’re selling. But such information is generally sketchy at best and, at worst, totally compromised by which companies are offering the best “spiffs” (extra commissions on specific models the companies are trying to unload) on any given day. Then there’s Walmart, Costco and all the lesser “marts” and “co’s.” Try and find someone there who can intelligently explain the pros and cons of plasma vs. LCD flat-panel HDTV. The “try and find someone” part is often difficult enough, the intelligent explanation part is almost always impossible.
Consider the difference at a local consumer electronics/appliance store. Yes, the prices are somewhat higher, but the staff is educated, they know their stuff. If they didn’t, they would have gone out of business years earlier.
And they’re a lot less likely to sell you an inferior product just to pick up a fast 20- or 30-buck “spiff.” Dependent, unlike chain stores , on repeat customers and word-of-mouth advertising, their imperative is selling you what will work best for you, not what will make a few extra dollars for them. With more and more retail shoppers turning to the web for their preliminary product research, local businesspeople are now able to establish themselves as their community’s real specialists in their fields online as well as in their stores.
Adding well-written professional content — articles, blogs, extended product information — to local sites elevates local businesses above chain stores. It gives customers confidence in the merchant as well as the merchandise.
To go back to the HDTV example, a blog discussing technology, programming, surround sound, room lighting and all kinds of consumer questions that are never answered on BigBoxStore.com can drive customers away from Walmart and into local stores. Similarly, a local garden products retailer can use a website to win customers away from the chains by including regularly updated articles on local climate and growing conditions.
One of the really great things about adding more quality information to a website is that it’s one of the few business moves you can make that has absolutely no downside. Unlike buying more newspaper advertising or radio spots, adding pages to a site generally costs nothing. Even if you don’t feel comfortable with your copywriting ability, acquiring customized web copy from a service like GetWebContent.com is relatively inexpensive.
You don’t even have to worry about providing too much information. The more questions you answer online, the more new ones consumers will think of. Best of all, the new questions will more advanced — much more impossible for a big box store clerk to answer — than the original ones.
Imagine Customer A, a true newbie, looking at a 56-inch TV in Costco. The four-line information tag says “Dolby Digital sound.” After a great deal of effort, Customer A lassos a clerk and says “that Dolby Digital there, is that the same thing as surround sound?” The clerk, not knowing or caring if the set’s surround sound is dependent on external speakers, says “yes.”
Not a complete answer, but more or less correct.
Now consider Customer B, who’s studied HDTV 101 on your website. Customer B goes to Costco, lucks into an employee, and says “Does this set support 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 surround sound?” Look for that person, Customer B, to leave Costco, shaking his or her head, and drive straight to your showroom.
The morale of this story is simple: A huge percentage of your potential customers are already taking a close look at your site’s content, maybe you should join them.
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Posted in Copywriting, Marketing | Post Your Comments
Published June 4th, 2007
in Search Engines.
Forget all the stuff about ethics, morality and the legality of copying someone’s copyrighted website content without permission and using it on another site. (It’s absolutely illegal, but there’s nothing you can do about it.)
Fact is, scraper sites (also called “made for AdSense sites” (MFA), or, “thin affiliate”) wouldn’t exist if the search engines didn’t want them to and the reason they want them to is because scraper sites pump tons of millions of dollars into the search-engine’s keyword-advertising coffers.
It really is that simple. Scraper sites exist because they generate mass revenue for search engines. If they didn’t, they’d be delisted for violating every major search-engine’s guidelines and anti- spamming rules and would quickly dry up and disappear.
There is hope, however. Pendulums always swing back the way they come and many people think the swing in favor of scrapers may have gone about as far as it can go. According to this theory, people searching for a given product or service are getting fed up with finding the same stupid scraped page turning up on as many as ten of the first 20 returns for their search term.
The theory also postulates that this revulsion is rapidly opening a huge window for some bright gearheads to approach the “usual-suspect” venture capitalists with a business plan for a new search engine that will be optimized for end users rather than scofflaws.
Whether that will happen remains to be seen. Most likely competition between the current Big Three will result in at least one of them trying to get an edge by positioning themselves as the consumer’s friend and the scrapers foe.
Still, the possibility of a new kid on the block is always there. Yahoo and Microsoft certainly never saw Google coming and tunnel vision is a contagious disease particularly prevalent among those who happen to be sitting on top of the mountain.
Frankly, there is very little you can do to protect your content from scraper crawlers that extract a sentence here and a snippet there that contain the keywords they are building their scraped sites around. There is, however, one way to limit the damage caused by scrapers lifting entire description pages or articles from your site.
Since the ScrapBot, like all search bots, is just a dumb machine looking for digital streams of zeros and ones that match a certain pattern. The best way to mitigate the damage they do is to refer to your website or business by name several times on each of your content pages.
These name repetitions must be in addition to any hotlinks on your pages, because the scraper bots will automatically delete links. Also try to put at least one reference to your site at the beginning of a sentence since some scrapers delete proper nouns in the middle of a sentence on the theory they might be business names that a reader can search for and go to directly, rather than click an ad on the scraper site.
Here’s an example based on a mythical video site (Dvdnation.com) that has an article about classic movies available on DVD:
Inserting a sentence like “Dvdnation offers the world’s best selection of classic movies for sale or rent on its website’s classics page” will at least let readers of the scraped copy know that a site named DVDNation exists and that it has what they’re looking for.
Realistically, a certain number of extremely bright people are always going to be making a career out of devising ways to scam and spam search engines for a very basic reason: If they’re successful, they can get rich a lot quicker than they can by working for IBM, NASA or even Google. Sorry to say but Crime, especially white collar crime, does pay. And if the “crime” in question is only a violation of industry rules and not the penal code — as is the case with SE spamming — the “pay” comes without any risk of punishment.
By the same token, schemes that take advantage of search engine loopholes all have a limited shelf life. Eventually the loopholes are plugged and the cyber-scoundrels have to move on to some other con game. Despite the financial attractiveness of scraping to the search engines, this too will pass. Eventually public opinion, if nothing else, will force them to start shutting it down.
The $100,000 question is: What to do in the meantime? Faced with diminishing search engine generated traffic caused by scrapers getting better return positions, what can you do?
One very necessary step is to open more doors to your website.
Another is to take steps to improve your site’s conversion ratio: If you can change that ratio from, say, five percent to ten percent you’ll be making just as much money from half as many visitors.
Of all the ways to increase conversion ratio, the most effective is almost always to increase both the quantity and quality of your content.
Quantity because the web is the most obvious and outstanding embodiment of the Information Age we’re all living in. People use the web to get information about everything from skin softeners to brain surgery. If your site doesn’t offer deep enough information about the products or services you’re selling, potential customers will have to look elsewhere for that information. And wherever else they look, they’re almost certainly going to find other places to buy.
Quality is equally important in raising sales-conversion ratios. Not just quality in the sense of good spelling and grammar, thought those are crucially important in convincing people they ought to trust you with their money. No, what is required when traffic is declining and making a terrific sales pitch to every visitor you do get is essential, is quality in the sense of sales power.
Professional advertising copywriters know what power words and sales hooks are and how to use them to motivate people to make a purchase. It isn’t a skill that’s taught in English 101 and it is a skill which develops only with experience. To decide whether your web content is good enough to satisfy even the most difficult-to-sell prospects, sit down and objectively read it. Read it as if you are “sort of” interested in the product but haven’t really made up your mind whether you want to buy it.
Did you find your mouse hand irresistibly moving toward the shopping-cart button when you finished reading?
If not, it’s probably time you consider ramping up with new, more effective words.
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Posted in Search Engines | Post Your Comments
Published May 15th, 2007
in Copywriting.
Blogs are different, quite unlike any of the other copy on most websites.
Strike that sentence. It needs a rewrite. Here’s how it should go: Good blogs are different, unlike any of the other copy on their websites.
As with everything else, there are good blogs, fair blogs and awful blogs. The good ones are written by people who understand the very real difference between blogging and copywriting product copy, articles, news items and other typical website elements.
To appreciate the difference, it helps to remember that blogs evolved not from the web’s commercial realm, but from its personal one. Specifically, blogs are the direct descendant of the web journals in which people chronicled their lives, loves, hates, obsessions, compulsions, successes, failures, relationships and anything/everything else they wanted the world to know about them.
Blogging, in its infancy, was simply a more technologically efficient way to keep a journal and allow other people to find it and comment on the entries.
As it turned out, blogs were so efficient — so bloody easy for search-engine bots to access, among other things — that they quickly became a favorite way, in many cases a virtually essential way, for commercial website operators like us to communicate with customers and potential customers.
Because blogs — be they personal or commercial — are inherently individual communications which should be written as one-on-one conversations. A blog may be read by five, 5,000, or five million people, but each entry should sound like it’s written to each one of them personally.
How do you do that? Good question. If we knew the answer, we’d all be fully tenured creative writing professors instead of lowly creative writers. Frankly, the only way we can explain it is to quote a great editor who once said, “always write as if you’re sitting around talking to a bunch of friends.” If you remember that, and a few other things, you’ll be greatly increasing the odds of your blog becoming a raging success.
The few other things:
– Don’t write a pitch: A blog is not where you should put glowing descriptions of the old hulks on your used car lot or extol the virtues of “set it and forget it” cooking over “watch it and worry about it” cooking. You have the rest of your website available for a hard sell, use your blog to win friends by giving them information in a non-aggressive, conversational way.
– Do sell your credibility: At the end of the day, your blog is all about you. If it’s done right, those reading it will be left with the impression that you shoot straight and know what you’re talking about.
This blog, for example, is our way of engaging you in a dialogue about different facets of web copywriting. If the blog works as we intend, you might learn a few things you didn’t know, remember something about the subject you’d forgotten, or leave this site with a few things to think about before adding new content to your site.
At the least, we’d like you to come away from the blog with the feeling that those of us here at GetWebContent have a clue and are qualified to provide any copy you might need written now or in the future.
– Don’t let your blog languish: One of the biggest debates in the blogging world involves posting frequency. Some experts advocate a rigid regular schedule, i.e. putting up a new post every Monday at 8:47 p.m. Others say the exact timing doesn’t matter as long as the blog is updated regularly. Everyone agrees on this: Letting a blog get stale is a recipe for doom.
A blog is like a diary, some days — even some weeks — there’s simply nothing to say. But a blog without a new entry at least every two or three weeks is like a diary with 80 percent of the pages blank, not very many people are going to be interested in it.
– Do respond to comments: You’re “talking” to your friends, remember? If you say “it’s hot enough to go to the beach” and a friend comments “you must be nuts, we’d freeze our butts off in bathing suits,” you’re going to come back with something, right? A blog is a conversation, to make it “sticky” you need to hold up your end. Be cool — as in polite — but do respond to both praise and criticism unless the comment is so basic (”I agree with what you said” or something similar) that no response is called for.
– Use your keywords, but don’t beat them to death: Everyone knows the question about the tree falling in the forest … would it make any noise if there was no one there to hear it? A blog — any kind of writing, really — is sort of like that. Would it be worth the effort if there was no one there to read it?
In order for people to read our blogs, they have to be able to find them. People who visit our sites can find them via a link, others will most likely have to enter through a search-engine click. So it’s important to lightly sprinkle your blog with SEO sweetener. But only lightly. Up to now, the major search engine algorithms seem to be working blogs quite a bit differently than they do other content like home page copy.
The important things seem to be freshness, relevance, perhaps even the amount of comments a blog attracts. So a small sampling of keywords, enough to establish the topic and the focus of the blog, is usually quite enough.
Always remember the bit about sitting around talking to your friends. Let’s say you sell running shoes online. And you’re sitting around talking to your friends about the Olympics.
Too many sentences like “the running shoes the American team uses are different from the running shoes the Algerian team has and the running shoes on the Nigerian team, which are high-top running shoes, while the Americans use low-cut running shoes and the Algerians wear lace-less running shoes” and even your very best friend will quit listening.
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Posted in Copywriting | Comment (1)
Published May 7th, 2007
in Copywriting.
Take half an ounce of carefully aged eye of gnat, add a pinch of rare earth from the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, two feathers from an extinct bird of your choice, one garlic clove and three tears from a Mongolian camel. Last, but most important, write your site’s URL on the back of a fortune cookie slip and toss that into the mix.
Carefully pour all the ingredients into the empty scrotum of a testicle festival-winning Brahma bull, tie the end with a silk cord, and shake gently for 46 seconds.
Add the packed scrotum to a four-quart cauldron filled with equal parts of Gentlemen Jack Daniels, Becks Beer and noni juice and bring to a rapid boil. With one hand, stir the pot briskly using a gnarled oak branch while waving a magic wand over the brew with the other.
Intone the following three times: Google, Google, toil and trooble, lift my site like a wacky noodle.
Prepare to be amazed by the sudden increase in your site’s Page Rank and return position.
But don’t be surprised if the magic doesn’t work. It never has yet. And almost certainly never will.
Improving a website’s search-engine visibility requires many skills; the ability to do magic isn’t one of them.
It also involves some senses, the most important of which is the one called “common.” Common sense … as in reading and following the major search-engines’ webmaster guidelines, common sense as in designing your website for end users just like the SEs tell you to, common sense as in avoiding all the pay-for-play search-engine spam scams.
The other important “sense” in SEOing a site is a sense of how other people think — specifically a sense of how your customers and prospective customers think.
No site in the world returns in the Top 10 for every possible keyword or key term search. Microsoft.com, for example, does not even show up in the first five pages in a Google search for computer software. (Earth To Redmond: Hey, if you’re out there listening you might think about changing your keywords a bit, you don’t make the first five pages at MSN.com either.)
So it’s vitally important that in selecting your keywords and writing your heads and descriptive text you think like someone not in the business. Try to forget that you already know everything there is to know about your industry and products and pretend to be someone who knows little but is curious. Forget “inside-baseball” jargon and use common English words (and even slang expressions) that people on the outside would be likely to search for.
Here’s an example. The consumer electronics industry language doesn’t contain the words “online dealers. ” Instead online and mail-order catalog sellers are referred to as the “direct channel.” Suppose you were selling cell phones online and instead of keywords relating to online, you used direct channel … Verizon direct channel, Cingular direct channel, direct channel cell phone deals. Who do you think would get more hits, you or a competitor using the word “online” instead of “direct channel?”
Falling into the trap of thinking everyone knows as much about a given subject as we do is easy. Try to avoid it when designing your site.
On the skill side of the SEO equation, there are mechanical skills and editorial skills.
Mechanical skills involve proper coding of metatags and other elements, making your site web-crawler friendly by providing accessible navigation tools, correctly using robot and follow tags, selecting a fast, non-spam-infested host, instigating an ethical, productive linking strategy, and other nuts-and-bolts things of that nature.
Editorial skills, which are very often the most crucial element in improving a lagging PR, involve content creation — particularly text.
The famous British writer Rudyard Kipling once said that words were “the most powerful drug used by mankind.” And that was before the invention of the computer, the web and the search engines.
If Kipling were alive today he’d probably refresh that thought with a few extra adjectives, like “most absolutely, positively powerful drug.” Because GoogleBot and its competitors don’t see pictures, they don’t watch Flash movies, they don’t listen to MIDI files. What they do is “read” words and follow links. And those words, including words in the anchor text and description of the links, become a key determinant in the site’s search engine fate.
Words, someone (not Kipling) once said, “can be used to shock, shout, amuse, puzzle, create a mood, demand attention, pay homage, heap scorn, invoke a time or place, burst upon a scene or leave a stage.”
They can also be used to make or break a website’s search-engine visibility. Before sitting down to write some for your site, best think carefully about what all those Big Botbrothers would enjoy reading.
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Posted in Copywriting | Post Your Comments
Published April 20th, 2007
in Copywriting.
Here’s a statement you never expected to read on this particular blog: It is possible to put too much content on a website.
There are certain immutable laws of nature and one of them is that you can overdose on just about anything except, maybe, air. And even that, if the pressure per square inch gets high enough, can crush you.
Too much water and you drown. Too much food and you get sick. Too much money and you get depressed worrying about how to spend it all … hhmmmm, maybe not. Maybe money is the exception that proves the rule. Come to think of it, good health is another such exception. Web content is not.
If the purpose of your website is to sell a product, a service or even an idea or philosophy, your copywriting goal should be to give end users all the content they need to make an intelligent, informed and motivated decision to do business with you. All the information they need without any extraneous data that might confuse or otherwise influence them into delaying or not making a purchase.
The print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica contains more than 40 million words, the copy on its home page totals only 209.
OK, not everyone has a product as well known and needing as little introduction as the Encyclopedia Britannica, and home pages alone do not a site make. There are also product pages, article pages, blog pages, link pages and other places where content is essential. Depending on circumstances, you might be able to make your site’s case in as little as 1000 words or you might need more than 10,000. But there is always going to be a finite ceiling above which information overload occurs.
The best way to avoid burying potential customers under an avalanche of words they don’t want, need and can’t process, is to make each word you do use work like a demon. Write purposefully, make sure each sentence advances your cause, replace generic articles that can be found on other sites with new ones which emphasize your business, craft product descriptions that reach potential customers on both an emotional and practical level.
If some of this sounds beyond your word-spinning skills, you’ve got lots of successful company: Not many (probably not any) CEOs of Fortune 1000 companies writes his or her firm’s web copy. They hire professionals to do it.
There’s another downside to tossing huge volumes of poorly written copy onto a site. In a recent response to a webmaster complaining about his blog’s delisting, Google software engineer Matt Cutts (who’s no slouch as a writer himself) documented that pitfall far more eloquently than we could.
“I’d recommend asking a friend to take a look at your website with a critical eye,” Matt wrote. “Yes, there certainly do appear to be paid links sprinkled throughout your posts (nearly all of them, in fact), but my favorite was one post that stopped in mid-sentence. That seemed strange, until I found the article that you’d copied wholesale from an article bank. The original article stopped in mid-sentence, so your post did too…
How about quantity? Dude, you wrote thirty-four blog posts in one day … I wrote maybe seven this weekend (cuz I won’t get a chance to blog much during the work week) and that took pretty much the whole weekend.“
Bad enough, but that was only the warm up. When Matt Cutts decides to throw a strike (as in striking something down), he slings a real 100 mph fast ball. Here’s how he concluded his advice to this webmaster:
Right now, your site doesn’t even look like it was written by a human. What value does your site add compared to the other dozens of sites with the same content? That’s the question I’d recommend looking at for your site. You said you’d value honesty, so that’s my honest feedback. That’s the sort of site that causes people to complain to us.
At GetWebContent.com, everything is written by humans who are working specifically for you. We will never send you a piece of copy cobbled together from something else we wrote previously. We will never sell anything we write for you to anyone else. We will never offer you a deliverable that doesn’t add value to your site.
No matter how big or small your job — be it ten words or 10,000 — we guarantee our work will be consistent with ethical web standards and meet the specifications set down in your order. If it doesn’t, we’ll rewrite it free.
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Published April 11th, 2007
in Copywriting.
Welcome, cyberspace wanderer, thanks for landing your starship on the very first GetWebContent.com blog post.
Though this blog, and GetWebContent.com itself, are brand new and - we hope - at least slightly exciting, the truth behind them is almost as old as humanity itself, certainly as ancient as the oldest profession and the first pottery and carpet bazaars. That eternal truth is this: Words sell.
Words sell. There is evidence, historical documents even, indicating that of all the beautiful courtesans offering their services to officers of the Roman Legion, the ones who earned enough to buy and retire to luxurious villas were those most skilled in conversation. Pillow talk, perhaps, but conversation nonetheless. Visit the Casbah in Morocco even today and the carpet merchants rolling the most rugs out of their stalls and into the arms of customers will be those who have best mastered the art of using words to describe their wares, haggle over prices, wheedle with wavering buyers, and, finally and most importantly, close a deal.
GetWebContent (GWC) exists to make it easy and financially feasible for webmasters who aren’t professional copywriters to add world-class search-engine optimized copy to their websites. To help them, in other words, attract more traffic to their virtual Casbah stalls and convert more of those carpet kickers into bona fide rug buyers.
Since this is the first entry in the GWC blog, let’s talk about the most basic on-topic question there is: How do you find out if you need to upgrade your website’s copy? The answer is as simple as asking yourself two simple questions.
Question 1: Does your site return well on search-engine queries? Forget Page Rank, it is - drum roll – irrelevant. Pure heresy, right? There are thousands of people making a good living selling the concept that achieving PR is the end all and be all of search-engine optimization. It’s not. It’s irrelevant. Truly.
There’s an old saying in retailing. It applied to Woolworth’s in 1890 and it applies to WalMart today: Nobody ever made a dime from a phone call. Strangely enough, no one ever made a dime from a high PR either.
Example: DVD Empire, #1 Google commercial return in a search for DVD (04/10/07). It’s PR is six. Yahoo Movies, 20 returns back from DVD Empire; Page Rank 7. Facets Multimedia, way back at the bottom of return page 19; PR 7.
You might want to be sitting down for this next one, the #4 Google return for the search term DVD has an “awesome” Google Page Rank of FOUR. So what? So this, the site in question, the one with the PR of four, is Netflix.com.
Netflix, the largest supplier of DVDs on earth … Netflix, which recently mailed out its one-billionth DVD … Netflix has a Page Rank of FOUR. But, you know something, it’s extremely unlikely that any Netflix execs give a big rodent’s butt about their dismal PR. Because they are in the top five sites returned for the search term “DVD.” And even more because their prime competitor, Blockbuster, doesn’t even make the first 100 returns despite its PR of 7.
Want a bit more evidence that Page Rank is irrelevant? Google big screen TV. Here, in order, are the Page Ranks of the top 10 returns: 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6, 8, 1, 4, 3. For the record, the big screen TV search returned 20 million 700 thousand hits. If Page Rank were relevant, would a site with a PR of ONE have come in at number eight?
So ignore page rank and consider your return position. Realistically consider it. There are tens of millions of websites out there and as many possible search terms as there are ways to combine words in the dictionary. Making page one or page two of an search engine’s return page is often as much a matter of sheer luck as anything else. If you’re returning in the first four or five or eight pages, your web content, metatags and links are probably looking pretty good to the search-engines’ electronic eyes.
If you’re not getting a good return position, you should consider revising and expanding your web content to bring your site into conformance with current search-engine expectations regarding the freshness, relevancy and uniqueness of words on websites. Though no one can predict exactly what affect any site changes will have on search engine rankings, adding high-quality articles, blogs, optimized home page copy, and robust product descriptions have paid big return-position dividends for many web operators.
The second question to consider is conversion ratio. Of the total number of unique visitors coming to your site from all sources - search engines, link partners, banner ads, newspaper ads, word of mouth, etc. - how many are buying something?
If the answer is “very few,” something is clearly wrong. Assuming your product selection and pricing is on a par with your competitors’, the problem probably has something to do with your content doing a poor job of telling your story to potential customers.
As another old business axiom puts it, “making the sale requires telling the tale.” We’re not talking about lies, deceptions, or evasions here … we’re talking about good tales, storytelling in the best sense of the word. We’re talking about web copy that tells your story in a positive, informative way that will make people want to do business with you. Web copy that focuses on the quality of your products, the dependability of your service, your deep knowledge of your business, your commitment to fair dealing.
Web copy that, to sum it all up in one word, that gives your site more credibility than competing sites. Because online - much more than in the brick-and-mortar environment - it’s the credible bird, not the early or late one, who gets the juiciest worms.
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