This is part one in a three part series on optimizing your website to generate more traffic and convert them to more sales than you are doing now. If you’re in virtually any kind of business, it should be clear by now that if you don’t have a web presence, other competitors in your market are going to leave you far behind. But having a web presence isn’t nearly enough.
Professional Copywriting
If you’ve spent any time around the Internet marketing game, you have almost certainly heard the phrase: “Content is King.” And content definitely is king in this field, but it may not always be clear exactly what this phrase means.
“Content is King”
What it means is that no matter what you do with your website, no matter how impressive your design or how well-thought out your marketing campaign, what matters in the end is the text on your web pages. When search engines are trying to decide whether to pull your site onto a results page, a large part of what they are looking for is the content. When other sites are deciding whether or not to trade links with you, what they are usually considering is whether or not you have useful content. When visitors to your site decide whether they are going to stick around, whether they are going to come back, and most of all, whether they are going to follow your call to action and convert to a sale, those decisions are all based on the content of your site. For this reason, the one thing you cannot afford to skimp on is content.
The Pitfall of Content Creation
The main pitfall of content creation is that it is not easy to recognize the skills required to create great content. Unlike design or hardware management, which require some level of technical expertise to perform at even the most basic level, anyone can put words on a page and have them make sense (although a surprising number of websites are filled with words on a page that don’t). Because of this, it’s easy to underestimate the benefits of having professional copywriting on your site. If your site goes down because of a mechanical failure, the CEO of the company can’t fix it. If you need to make a design change, the sales guy probably won’t know what to do. On the other hand, both of these individuals can probably put together a coherent paragraph on a page. But that doesn’t mean that paragraph is going to help your business succeed, and it might even hurt.
What a Professional Copywriter Does for You
Readability
The longer you have someone on your site, the greater the chance that they will convert to a sale. You can stuff a page with keywords and get millions of hits, but if the average stay time is 0.3 seconds, that number is meaningless, and everyone knows it. On the other hand, a low bounce rate is like gold in the Internet marketing industry. What’s going to keep people on your site? If they have something to read. If an Internet surfer is directed to a page that looks like it was written by an eighth grade foreign exchange student, not only won’t they stick around, they might become angry enough to actively avoid your product. On the other hand, people are dying for something interesting and engaging to read, and if you provide it, you may have a customer for life.
SEO
Of course, there’s also a matter of getting people to the site in the first place. To do that, you have to have good SEO, which means an appropriate number of optimal keyword phrases. Anyone can generate keyword phrases, but working them seamlessly into web copy is a lot harder than one might think, especially if some of the keyword phrases are very close variations of some others. Furthermore, when this is done badly, it’s very easy to see, like a ventriloquist with his lips moving.
Energy
If copy doesn’t have enthusiasm, that’s obvious too. If you’ve got someone inexperienced or worse yet, experienced in a completely different field, writing your copy, it’s going to be difficult for them to generate the enthusiasm that you need to convey. It might be possible if you are the owner of your company and writing about what you truly believe in, but if you’re running the company, how much copy do you have time to write? Save your writing energy for your blog and let a professional handle your web copy.
Marketing
A good salesman knows how to get people excited enough about the product or service to buy. A good writer knows how to capture people’s interest. A good copywriter does both. Professional copywriting is about generating enthusiasm and using it to convert to sales. Professional copywriters have the experience to make this happen. Others don’t.
There are many reasons why you may not be getting or converting as much traffic as you’d like. If you are in this situation, however, your copywriting situation should be the first place you look. If your content isn’t holding up, none of the rest of it matters. Before you do anything else, make sure that your content is created by top notch copywriters who know how to fill web pages with engaging content and know how to convert traffic. Once you’ve got that nailed down, you can worry about other aspects of your Internet marketing strategy.
