Dangerous Thinking

If you’re writing online or offline marketing copy and have worked out the answer to the question, What’s in it for me? (WIIFM, in some quarters), you’re a significant way to producing effective communications.

Away from the SEO arena, more often than I’d like, WIIFM isn’t as obvious as it should be – clients haven’t done their homework, typically, and horrifyingly have little idea why people do or should buy from them.

But one thing that hit home very quickly once I started writing optimized copy was how often WIIFM is answered by key phrase research. Now, you are doing key phrase research before writing SEO copy, aren’t you?

I like to think of most searches as being questions – for example, how many of your searches can be extended to say ‘can you tell me about ……?’, ‘where can I find …..?’, ‘what will help my …..?’? The knack is to start looking through the potential key phrases from the searcher’s point of view. See how many of them fit with a WIIFM mindset. The ones that do are often the ones from the really hot prospects, and they’ll be the key phrases you’ should end up selecting (as long as they satisfy the rest of your criteria, of course).

The Google Sandbox is the part of the Google algorithm that keeps new sites out of the top pages for popular natural search results. If you have a new site, you’re potentially sandboxed for up to 12 months – we give 9-12 months as a rule of thumb. That’s maybe up to a year of investment in Organic SEO, with little immediate to show for it.

But, like most things on the Web, you’re not 100% certain of being sandboxed. It’s only for the really high traffic key phrases that the sandbox operates. Somewhere, there’s a line, below which Google will be happy to list you up there on the first page.

In fact, we’ve discovered that as we dig deeper and deeper in key phrase research for our clients, we have found ourselves recommending key phrases that it later turns out they have not been sandboxed for – in some cases to our great surprise. So we find ourselves recommending a mix of high-traffic key phrases as an investment for the future – they’ll kick in when the site emerges from the sandbox – and some that we might just get some immediate results for.

If we do succeed, then maybe we can save our client some PPC click-through budget.

If you found How to win against the big boys on the search engines interesting, you must read my latest article, on Reducing Risk for Start-up Sites on the Web Positioning Centre site:

‘Fail fast and fail cheap’ is a piece of advice that’s embedded in Internet culture. It’s also a piece of advice that many Internet entrepreneurs and established businesses fail to fully understand.

Let’s strip away that idea of failing, for a moment. Let’s modify it to ‘launch fast and cheap’. Many small businesses and start-ups soon get carried away with launching and lose sight of how they should be spending their budget.

The article shows how to stop failing fast and expensive.

The Top 10 Search Terms in 10 Categories in March 2007 from Clickz.

When I write optimized copy, I aim for key phrase densities between 5% and 10% for each of my targeted key phrases. OK, some people would take me to task on this, arguing typically for using certain numbers of key phrases on the page. All I can say, is using my preferred measurement tool and these kind of densities (within Web Positioning Centre’s overall SEO approach), the key phrase density approach works!

However, sometimes something can go wrong later along in the site build. Someone may decide to add some more content to the page, thus diluting the key phrase densities, and losing some of the leverage we’d be expecting on the key phrases. For example, doubling the amount of copy on the page will roughly halve the key phrase densities.

The copy then needs to be reworked to bring back the focus on the key phrases.

The moral of the story? Where possible, write optimized content with a clear view of the layout it is going into. Consider all the search-engine readable copy on the page as you work on your key phrase densities.

At Web Positioning Centre, we use a wide toolkit of measures to promote of clients’ sites – Organic and PPC, Managed and Viral Linking, Technical and content-based approaches.

They certainly take care of increasing traffic through higher positions on natural searches or carefully conceived advertisement campaigns. But sometimes we find we have to look more closely at a client’s Web site, too.

We can find, for example:

Usability issues such as menuing systems that thwart the visitor’s attempts to navigate the site.

Badly conceived sales funnels which serve to confuse and/or demand too many clicks. Sometimes it’s just too complicated to make a sale and the shopping basket gets abandoned.

Insufficient sales copy. Some e-commerce sites rely on photographs, alone, to make the sale. Their owners haven’t learned from catalogue selling, where the copy is the clincher. While our optimized content often tackles a large part of this issue, often we need to look at the site as a whole and produce non-optimized selling copy, as well as some more general and corporate material to ensure that prospective purchasers feel happy about doing business with our client.

We see SEO as the most important part of the online marketing for a site. But sometimes shortcomings of the site itself need to be addressed before a client can reap the full benefits of our work.

Great copy – whether it’s optimized or non-optimized – shouldn’t follow fashion mindlessly.

Over the past week, I’ve received eight pieces of marketing telling me the company is ‘passionate’ about whatever they do – a company that sells outdoor equipment is ‘Passionate about the outdoors’, a financial services company was ‘passionate about saving me money’ and blah and blah. Someone on a quiz programme was ‘passionate about cooking’.

The word is getting almost meaningless. It’s certainly languishing in cliche-land.

You mustn’t just say what you think is fashionable – you’ll get swallowed in so many similar propositions (oops, I almost said ‘your customers won’t be able to see the wood for the trees’). You must instead appeal directly to your customers and prospects.

Go on. Do the hard work and start reaping the rewards.

‘Within weeks of David Rosam writing the copy for our site, we had zoomed up Google. We sometimes pass on to David the many compliments we receive about our site. (Not always, we don’t want him to get big-headed!)’

Thanks Julie! (Big-headed? Moi?).

Take a look at Essential Business Guide.

My latest article shows how SEO methodologies can increase your copy’s effectiveness.

How does researching key phrases help the quality of your sales copy? Because, by selecting the correct key phrases and building your copy around them, you’ll be answering the questions that are being asked by your potential customers.

You can read the whole piece at Web Positioning Centre.

I received an e-mail from one of our clients. He points out how properly executed SEO copywriting not only increases traffic, but boosts sales:

SEO is proving to be worth every penny. Our online sales are up approximately 500% in five months. Your new content has not only worked with your linking to increase traffic, but it has also roughly doubled our conversion rate.

Karoly Nunhofer, IEKO (www.ieko.co.uk)

Karoly’s words excited me, not only because we’ve made a positive contribution to IEKO’s business, but because his experience shows SEO copy is not just for search engines. It engages with people and tackles another of online business’ great challenges – increasing conversions.