Write your way to a better CTR
Is your CTR something you are happy with? In Adwords it’s distinctly measurable and even in organic listings and Google Places listings it’s something that is a part of every marketers consideration, or at least it should be.
Your click-through-rate (CTR) ultimately determines how much of your target market are seeing or experiencing your offering. Getting this right can be potentially worth more than improved rankings as you are getting more visitors for relevant keyphrases – it doesn’t take as much work as expanding a SEO or PPC campaign to new avenues.
Improving the relevance of your ad copy, display URL and destination URL can result in increases in CTR within your PPC account. It’s important to tweak and try different things in the ad copy and it’s also worth looking at using the Dynamic Keyword Insertion tool in your Adwords account.
With SEO, getting your Title tag and meta description to include the right message is equally important and if possible, linking your site to an Google+ profile using the rel=”author” tag will give your SERP result a bit more visibility, which means you might not need to be first to get more traffic.
With your meta description and ad copy, be assertive, direct and succinct but don’t make any claims you can’t live up to. Display your competitive advantage and understand the needs of your audience – communicating this understanding of what the market wants will win you more traffic. Keeping customers (and hencemaximising your ROI from advertising) is a result of being honest with what you can deliver.
SOPA – Bad News for Online Businesses
When Facebook and Google are in agreement, it’s usually time to raise your eyebrows and ask ‘why?’. Well SOPA is one of those instances – it’s a bill in the US aimed at counteracting piracy and protecting intellectual property but sadly, in its current format it’s likely to do more harm than good.
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act – a pioneering piece of legislation in the US, which if passed will have a massive impact on internet usage worldwide as other governments follow the US lead on tackling piracy.
However, as this video will explain, SOPA in it’s current form is likely to have a detrimental impact on many businesses:
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
What can we do to stop this happening?
The internet is by no means the perfect realm and like much of society, it has it’s negatives and piracy is one of those but the SOPA approach to tackling piracy isn’t the best approach. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and the vast majority of online marketers and web developers are opposed to SOPA and related laws and so far their voice is being heard – at least to some extent!
So there is a drastic need for other online professionals – even part-timers, volunteers and other enthusiasts – to weigh into the debate and add their voice to the chorus of complaints about SOPA and make a difference. If this law is passed in the US, other countries will follow and as declared in the video, it’s a lot harder to change laws than it is to simply block or remove a web page.
Content Writing Ideas
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.
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.
Guest Blogging
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 to write on a web page
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.
Landing Page Content
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.
Writing for PPC Landing Pages
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.
Linking in Copywriting
Improve your SEO campaign with internal linking
One thing many novice online marketers (and even some established pros) forget to do is cross-linking their SEO content. Internal links are a vital part of any successful SEO strategy and direct search engine crawlers to pages you see as most relevant for the anchor text that forms the link. For example, if you have a special offers page, and you make reference to special offers in a blog post, then your anchor text “special offers” should be hyperlinked to the special offers page.
Internal linking is another signal to Google and other search engines to reinforce what a page is about. If you have keywords in your title, in your heading tags (h1, h2 etc.) and in the anchor text for internal links, then you are more likely to rank for relevant search phrases inputted by your target market.
This is a fundamental element of any search engine optimisation strategy – but don’t over do it. I usually try to set a limit of one link per 100 words, you can probably get away with more but I think it starts to look unnatural. Also, don’t link to the same internal page twice from a blog post or site article, or even a static page – there is no extra value to be had from linking to a page twice – even if then anchor text is different.
If you can get your internal link in the first 100 words or so, it’s more likely to get crawled by search engines each time they visit the page – there are theories that suggest Googlebots don’t crawl entire pages every single time a crawl is done. They apparently make assumptions that pages haven’t changed and don’t crawl it through to the end – which means links at the end of a document can get overlooked. Not sure if this is an absolute fact of SEO but I have heard it from several industry professionals.
Spelling and Grammar Matter!
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.
Online Copywriting Ideas
Build your online presence with more web content
If you are considering blogging and developing a social presence online, where to find ideas for content can be difficult. You may have some decent ideas to start off with – and suddenly you decide to write a blog post every day but quickly discover you have run out of content for your website before the end of week 1.
They key to online content is to pace yourself, build a content strategy before heading straight into it. To novice content writers, ideas and words on paper are often the slowest and most painstaking parts of writing. Getting words on paper – even in bullet point form is a good start.
Ideas can come from your day-to-day working life – questions customers ask; changes to prices due to increases in supplier/transport costs; government regulations affecting your industry etc. are just some examples of where the inspiration for content can come from. A good old-fashioned notepad and a pen at work are a good idea – otherwise a great idea you think of might suddenly be forgotten due to other daily issues occupying your mind.
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