Ever read a website and decided to impulse buy?  I bet you don’t know why, it just “spoke” to you – well, creating copy that speaks is not just about being a wordsmith (although it helps) it’s about helping the reader to really want it.

Golden Rules for good copy:

So, what do you write?

Before you type a single word, spend some serious time thinking about your brand.  Know everything there is to know about your business and your customers and know exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it.  This might take a little brand soul searching (otherwise known as a Brand Discovery, Think Tank, Creative Brief or Creative Discovery) so that every word is the right word for your brand’s personality.

Position your Positioning Statement

Your positioning statement is those few little words that sum up what your business is all about, what you do, what is unique about you, what’s in it for your customer and what market position you own – simple?  Not on your life.  Finding a unique, desirable position (and positioning statement) is the foundation of your branding and it deserves your time and attention.  It also deserves to be prominent on your website as it tells your readers exactly why you are the best at what you do and why what you do is better than what your competitors do.

Logo and Tagline, a match made in heaven

If you manage to make your positioning statement succinct and catchy, then you’ve got yourself an all-in-one tagline.  If not, you’ll need a separate “catch phrase” that your readers can take away and remember you by.

So your positioning statement might be:

The only makers of psychic Garden Gnomes.

And your tagline might be:

Gnomes that know.

Your tagline will be attached to your (relevant, meaningful, emotive, engaging, memorable, replicable) logo and your positioning statement should be given pride of place on your site and repeated through your copy.

Online Marketing still needs to be Marketing

In the rush to jam pack all that SEO goodness into your site, don’t lose sight of the key principles of real world Marketing.  It’s great to be an outstanding online marketer, it’s the best shop front on the busiest street, but when it comes to purchasing, it’s people, not computers that make that final decision.  Always keep everything you know about marketing in mind while you write.  Everything you considered when you designed your flyer or newspaper ad still applies here.

Don’t keyword stuff, be clever but clear, spell and grammar check, get someone smarter than you to proofread it, use white space and titles to make it readable, use appropriate pictures and make sure it’s something you’d read if you were a potential customer.

The more you say, the less valuable each word becomes

Keep it short and help the reader find the information they’re after with headers, bolding, dot points, numbering and design layout.  You’ve got just eight seconds to show them something they like – so don’t mess around.

Talk to everyone, and nobody listens, but speak to one person and everyone eavesdrops.

Always write copy like you are speaking to one person – refer to them in the second person (you) and talk about their business specifically (your business needs…).

If your product has a diverse customer base, create a new page for each market segment.  So if you cater to both small business and domestic buyers, have an easy to find page targeted specifically to each.

Sell the benefits not the features

Say your business stitches logos onto T-shirts.  Which sounds more appealing to you?

“We stitch logos in any colour, on to staff uniforms and T-Shirts”

“Give your business a professional, memorable image with full colour logos on all your staff uniforms”

It’s not about you!

One of the most common mistakes when writing copy is to make it all about you.  Your potential customer wants to know just one thing “What’s in it for me?” so make sure your copy is at least 75% about just that.  Tell them how their problems will be solved, tell them how their customers will feel or how their neighbours will be jealous – it’s ALL about them.

Be honest

If you can’t keep a promise, don’t make a promise.  If you can’t supply meals for 4000 people, don’t fake it.  If your product is average quality, don’t say it’s high quality.  If you have to lie, then you are in the wrong market position.  Have faith in your brand, it has customers out there somewhere, tell the truth and they will come, tell a lie and you’ll just annoy somebody else’s customers – do that and you’ll end up with nothing but a bad reputation.

Be true to your brand

If your brand image is elite and sophisticated, don’t run a “CRAZY 50% off sale” just because times are a bit tough, and if you successfully sell goods at a “CRAZY 50% off” don’t throw some overpriced product into your mix just because you can – every business decision you make effects the position you own – don’t waste it or water it down because someone else will come in and grab it out from under you!

Plagiarism – for people with no idea

It might be tempting to find a website you like and “borrow or paraphrase” content.  Firstly, that’s illegal, secondly, Google doesn’t like people who copy and may punish you with awful page rankings and thirdly, how are you going to establish yourself as unique if you are just a copy of someone else?  Your brand is the most valuable thing you own, make sure you look after it properly.

Finally, never assume you can just do it

Would you assume that you can install electrical wiring, speak Cantonese or de-sex the dog? Never, these are tasks for skilled professionals.  Just because words are a tool you use everyday, don’t assume it makes you an expert on marketing.  If you can’t afford to engage a professional copywriter, at least do your research before attempting to write your website copy. It’s the online face of your company, make it one worth gazing upon!

Nice to see an additional set of location markers in the maps on Google Local Business Listings today. This is the first time I’ve noticed them (new or have I not been paying attention?!).  They are smaller than the main set of 7 location markers.   Nice!

A web search is performed by typing relevant words into a search engine. These words form the search query (also called a keyword phrase KWP or search string). Eg If someone is looking for a house to rent in Sydney they might use the keyword phrase ‘home rentals Sydney ‘.

The search engine then accesses the search index and returns a list of relevant sites in the form of a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). There are often thousands of relevant web pages listed on the results page. For this reason search engine developers created rules for ‘ranking’ the results so they could be listed in order of importance to make it easier for the user to find what they are searching for.

These ‘rules’ are a set of complex calculations called search algorithms.

What is a search algorithm?

Search algorithms assign value to different parts of each web page and then work out an overall score based on how relevant the web page content is to the search query. Some search algorithms also take into account how popular the web page is based on how many other sites link to the page (especially if the linked site is of a similar topic). The best match takes the first spot on the search engine results page. This is often called a No. 1 ranking.

Search algorithms are frequently updated and are different for each search engine. For obvious reasons they are not disclosed however, basic information is published by each search engine in the form of guidelines and recommendations for web page developers.

A search engine finds out about each web page by ‘reading’ the code. (To see this code, visit a web page then choose ‘view’ and then ’source’ from your web browser).

There are certain parts of this code that a search engine will favour. These are generally divided into two categories:

•  ‘on the page’ content which is visible to a user. Eg the web page title, headings, text and links

•  ‘off the page’ content which is information contained in the code that is NOT visible to the user. Eg ‘meta tags’ and ‘alt text’ (these are names given to specific parts of the html code that creates web pages).

The type of information that can be indexed from a web page will depend on how the page is written (on the page content) and built (off the page content). This determines what information is made available to a search engine.

Some web page content is difficult or impossible for search engines to access and index. For example, content that is purely ‘visual’ such as a picture of a word cannot be ’seen’ by a search engine, therefore the typed version of a word is often preferable. Other types of content that a search engine cannot ‘easily’ index include: dynamic content such as that generated by an online database, frames based web pages, content created with Macromedia Flash and content accessed via JavaScript’s. 

The first step with search engine optimisation is to make sure page content is accessible to search engines so that it can be properly indexed. A web page that has been built with care for search engine accessibility is commonly called a search engine friendly web page.

How?

Search engines rely on automated programs called ’spiders’ (also called crawlers or robots) to traverse the World Wide Web, following hyperlinks (linked text) from web page to web page. These spiders collect and catalogue data from each web page and store the information in a database called a ’search index’.

The major search engines have their own search engine spiders and create their own search index which is regularly revised to keep the information accurate and up-to-date. Did you know the individual crawlers actually have names?! Google’s web crawler is called ‘Googlebot’ and Yahoo’s web crawler is called ‘Slurp’.

Data collected and stored in a search index provides an overview of a web page. The page can then be quickly and accurately matched to a relevant search query and included in the search engine results page (SERP).

The goal of a search engine is to provide the most relevant match to each search query in as little time as possible.

The goal of a web page owner is to make sure their web page is matched to every relevant search query and included in the search results page when it should be. Search engine optimisation helps to make this happen.