Getting the best response from your website audience isn’t all about having a great product or service or offering a great price or special offer. It’s important to get an understanding of your target market and talking their language. Unless you have a very technical product, your content should avoid jargon and be kept as short and concise as possible.

Copywriting for calls-to-action requires a great attention understanding of what triggers a response from your audience. Whatever your conversion rate with calls to action (CTAs), you should always be inclined to test different types through A / B testing or at least make minor changes to the message to try to improve the clicks and numbers of people fulfilling your call to action.

Here’s a few tips worth noting when writing for calls-to-action:

1. Keep the content concise – don’t use 100 words where 10 will do and don’t over-elaborate unless that content is required to sell your product or service. This is ultimately about knowing your product and why people chose to buy it.

2. Be consistent and relevant – don’t say something in your CTA that isn’t consistent with what you have said about your product or service elsewhere on the page.

3. Use action words – verbs tend to generate a better reaction with CTAs than other types of words as they encourage a specific action.

4. Use numbers – where possible and where it is meaningful to do so, use numbers to make your product more attractive.

5. Use words that imply you have some level of expertise in your chosen field – whether it’s an ‘exclusive’ or ‘insights’ or ‘advice’ or ‘hints’, be sure that what you are offering implies that it can’t be gotten easily elsewhere.

Applying these tips and split testing your content and CTAs will give you the raw materials to create a better conversion rate and see you get more profit from your website.

Ideas can be industry-specific or more broad

When it comes to getting ideas on what to write on for your blog it’s important not to fall into the trap of writing purely to target a specific keyword. It is important to factor keywords into what you write but if the keywords are the reason that you are writing, the likelihood that you are churning out low quality, repetitive and uninteresting content is a lot higher.

Ideas can come from a range of direct and indirect sources – government legislation and special events in your targeted geographical area; how you or your industry plan to contribute to climate change or some form of charity; queries your staff encounter on a regular basis and of course tips and advice that you can impart on your target audience. Whether you own a large international e-Commerce site operating out of Dublin, or produce vehicle graphics in Galway, there is benefit to be had from producing frequent content relating to your business in order to educate and build trust amongst your target audience.

It’s worthwhile dissecting your Google Analytics keyword data to determine what people are interested in on your website – talk directly to that audience and give them more of the same information, or even just give them teasers with a quality call-to-action which may prompt them to contact your business and spend some money.

A guest blog post increases exposure to your audience

If you know your target audience well, a guest blog post on another blog that they are likely to read is a good idea to attract more eyeballs to your blog or website. One of the biggest mistakes made with guest blogging is writing purely for the objective of getting a decent link into a website.

This is a seriously flawed approach – links shouldn’t be the reason behind why you do something to promote your website or business. Sure, links are a valuable outcome – from a genuine source. It’s a natural link, which is very rare on the web, so it should be one of the more valued links to your site.

The objective of your guest blog article should be your existing audience or prospective audience. Your blog article should deliver quality content to your target audience; it should be something the host blog is going to benefit from publishing in some way; and it should ideally,  make the readers think ‘yeah, I’ll come back here again and read some more’.

The motivation behind guest blogging and posting in general should be to build a loyal readership – people who rely on your content. The more they rely and trust in what you have to say, the more likely they are to buy from you at some stage in the future.

It’s also worth noting that you shouldn’t write a blog post for an external blog until you’ve agreed the context, writing style and length of the blog post with the host. There’s nothing worse than writing a blog post and then discovering your intended host doesn’t want to publish it for whatever reason.

How much web content is too much?

When writing for the web, there is no hard and fast rule for how much content you should write. How much you should write will depend on a number of things – for instance if you are a photographer, then the images you have produced in the past are likely to be far more effective than words. There is the obvious argument that you need content for SEO but Google and other search engines have advanced in terms of the way they evaluate content so writing reams of content stuffed with keywords no longer works like it did once upon a time.

It’s also worth asking how much information is too much information for potential customers. Is it better to tell all, including price, and then hope that readers will become customers or is it better to say enough to encourage them to make contact so that your sales team can get to work reinforcing your competitive advantage? The answer here is that it depends on the type of product or service you offer, as well as competitive factors.

Higher involvement products usually require more content

If you have a low value, low-involvement product that everybody uses then you don’t need much content to sell that product. Take socks for example, everybody uses them but not many people think about ‘luxury socks’. They just want to buy socks – quickly, decent quality, reasonable price…SOLD.

Then take something like a sports car at the opposite end of the spectrum – it’s more costly, it’s a higher involvement product (purchasing decision takes longer, more thought etc.). In this instance, you may need more content to sell the benefits of your sports car – what makes it better than a Ferrari, Aston Martin or Lamborghini. You need to communicate this – and if a test drive is the proof potential customers need, then your content needs to encourage a test drive.

All products fall somewhere along the ‘involvement scale’ in terms of the decision-making process. Knowing where your product or service sits will help determine the amount of content you need.

If you have a technical product – does your target market need to know the technical details? Do they understand the technical details? If the technical details don’t come into the purchasing decision, then they don’t need to be added.

In summary, focus on the information that sells your product, don’t use 10 words where one will do and be as short and direct as possible. If you follow these rules, you won’t have written too much – you’ll have written enough. Layout is another factor, which we will discuss next week.

Write for the audience not for Google bots

Striking a balance between SEO and pitching your message is a real battle for in-house SEOs and online marketers. The marketing experts want flowery language that embellishes a landing page and perfectly pitches a product but the SEO professional is intent on getting as many semantic variations of keywords into the content. But who is right? Who gets to stamp their authority on the landing page?

A landing page is any page of a website that is a point of entry for your target audience. If your PPC and SEO campaigns are well run, you will have several landing pages on your site – each talking to the relative audience segment.

Your landing page needs to appeal to that audience – if your product or service is appealing, then you are likely to be generating sales. However on the opposite side of the coin, you have the SEO aspect, which is geared at attracting the web traffic in the first place. It’s a real balancing act perfecting the ideal landing page content and there is a lot of testing involved to get it right but the most important thing you can do is make sure your target market is the primary audience to which you are writing – not search engine robots.

Split test different versions to improve conversions

Writing purely for landing pages is a different concept to writing for SEO. Search engine optimisation places certain constraints on the way you write – you must include certain keywords, and a certain number of those keywords, which can effect how direct your message is.

Balancing SEO and your marketing message can be done – it’s a specialist skill, but if you are advertising your business on PPC  platforms such as Google Adwords, through stand alone landing pages, then the SEO element of a page doesn’t come into play. This gives a writer freedom to write the marketing message exactly as they want it, rather than feeling obliged to work around certain phrases or headings.

Writing a more direct message to your target market usually results in higher conversions. The only down side is that you have to pay pro rata for your PPC traffic. It’s also worth split testing different versions of a landing page – changing headings to have more or less ‘impact’, which can compromise the trust of a reader (if it’s over-promising something or claiming something outrageous for example).

It’s not just design and layout that can be split tested on landing pages – test bullet points versus plain text. Test 300 words versus 100 words. Test a page with the prices included versus one without.

Testing is a key success factor for online marketing – if you can increase your conversion rate from 2% to 3%, you are effectively doubling your sales opportunities, which can significantly influence your profit.

Correlation between grammar  and Google PageRank

The quality of online content is an important issue for online marketers but how relevant is it really? How much should professional SEOs and online marketers worry about things like spelling and grammar in their web content. Well according to Google, it is important – not as a direct signal for search engine optimisation per se but it is important and from analysis, pages with better content and grammar tend to earn greater trust, respect and ultimately PageRank.

In this video Matt Cutts explains how spelling and grammar should probably be metrics for evaluating the quality of content on websites.

It seems logical that spelling and grammar are important factors – the more professional your content appears to your target market, the more trust and loyalty you build (all other things being equal). While it’s not a ranking  right now, there is the possibility that it will in the future – especially when Matt Cutts says it’s a fair indicator of quality.

To ensure you are meeting quality guidelines with your web content, follow a policy of proofreading and sub-editing material before it’s published and also re-read the post when it goes live. Have someone else read it though because you are less likely to spot mistakes in your own content.