Ways to make your website content perform better.

As business owners and web marketers we all spend a lot time and effort increasing traffic to our websites. We write great, relevant content, spend a lot of time on the website design and ultimately engage our visitors with a well thought out and useful website.

But there’s one thing that often gets missed, what happens when your potential client gets to the contact or conversion page? It’s a waste if you’ve put all that effort in getting visitors to your website and then send them to a form that is unhelpful or daunting and likely to make your visitor exit the site altogether.

The good news is that this is an area where there’s been a lot of research and while the metrics might vary from study to study, the trends are clear and able to be replicated.

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I’ve bought a few things online over the last couple of weeks, including replacing broken wine glasses, finding a favourite and scratched album from the 70s that has been re-released on CD for the first time and tracking down replacement earphone foam covers. I’d have to say it’s been an interesting experience.

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I had a conversation yesterday with a customer about a service offered by a another website, and it was a timely reminder of the copywriting rule to never make assumptions about your customers or their knowledge.

In any industry, there tends to be a base level of knowledge, and often a lot industry specific language that can be confusing or make no sense to customers (unless they’re in the same industry of course).

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In my last blog, I mentioned how many websites don’t include their contact number or address on their website, and simply have a form for users to fill out if they need to contact the site owner.

Frequently, the impact of that on site visitors is that they don’t trust the site, and why would you buy from someone who doesn’t want to be contacted.

In ecommerce, trust is everything, if shoppers don’t trust a site, they won’t buy!

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I’m a big fan of concise “how to” blogs and articles that provide good tips on how to achieve something without having to spend hours researching and reading. As the web gets ever more congested with competing sites, the need to stand out and be the site that converts to sales or inquiries is becoming evermore important. This blog is about how to achieve better conversions on your site.

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Your website designer is in charge of your website’s graphic design but your website’s page content (text and images) is typically the responsibility of the site owner/manager. Whether you agree with the notion or not, we do judge a book by its cover; your website users judge your website on its appearance and they decide within seconds whether your website’s content applies to their needs or not. And, as a picture speaks a thousand words, it makes good sense to invest in quality images, especially true if you sell products in an e-commerce environment (i.e. online store).

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For most businesses now a website is a vital part of sales, marketing and branding efforts.

Visitors go to your website for a particular reason, and in most cases that’s not to see the latest trends in web design, but to find out about your products or services. So you need to ensure that you answer their questions easily and quickly and use your website to sell your product or service

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It’s not uncommon for new websites to be ‘sent live’ with pages marked ‘under construction’ and products missing important images – and so on. Launching a website ‘half baked’ sends the wrong message to new visitors and increases the risk of losing initial visitors forever due to frustration.

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Begin with your shop’s first category, and slowly work your way “down the list” until you’ve given each category and product page its suitable overhaul. Don’t cut corners – take your time and work methodically through your store’s categories. The end result will be a “fully stocked” store with sensational images and amazing page content!

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I firmly believe that by concentrating on writing quality product and web page content, and publishing regular blogs – and all the while sticking to some simple writing conventions – that your so-called SEO will take care of itself.

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Retire your web pages of boring, plain text, and replace them with newly designed, interactive content that engages your readers and leads them to the target on the page: your call to action. Move beyond embedded page video and image galleries, and introduce elements that better engage your visitors.

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In a recent post we looked at website usability and focused on navigation. Today we’ll look at on page usability.

It’s interesting that various studies show that website visitors typically read less than half the text on a page, with some studies showing less than 30% of text read. Whatever the statistics actually are, it’s clear you have to plan and write specifically for the web rather than copy and paste text from other media.

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When you’re writing a blog the best way to keep on schedule is to have a series of topics ready to write to. One that I hadn’t intended to cover again for a while is copy writing, especially as it relates to products although the principles apply to any copy on a site. So why revisit this topic? Over the last week I’ve had discussions with a couple of clients who have been keen to improve their online sales results, but really don’t see the need to rewrite and spruce up their product descriptions.

Today we’ll provide some essential tips for writing product descriptions or any website content. Some are obvious, and others perhaps less so.

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I'm a firm believer that the “wow” factor is provided by a website's content, starting with its images. However, images can be a website's greatest asset but they can also be its Achillie's Heel.

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In my last blog we looked at the increasing Google focus on website usability in their algorithm. In this blog we’ll start to look at some of the principles of good usability design, and as it is such an involved subject we’ll split the blog over a few posts.

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