Reasons and ideas around creative content

Why is quality content important

Quality content builds word of mouth, which brings visitors, which builds brand and reputation. An example of social networking and word of mouth recently was demonstrated by the Spanish fashion icon retailer Zara. The first Australian store opened in Sydney last month with crowd levels as great as the Apple Ipad 2 launch with minimal advertising and no previous Australian presence. The retailer relied on blogs, fashion forums and other social media to get the message out there, and it worked, they even made the prime time news.

In the past, it was more difficult to build brand reputation and subsequently your business just by having quality content on your website, in your newsletters or advertising bumf. Unless you spent big money on traditional media advertising your potential clients couldn’t find you.

Referral marketing – why content is important

The best advertising has always been word of mouth, now it is available for free on a grand scale – Social Networking. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and many others add up to a valuable source of referrals and because they come from known sources, your audience already has a built in trust factor with them.

To create this magnificent online word of mouth, and thus improve your brand visibility, you need to give something in the way of excellent quality content to your users. Every time you interact with your users, ask them to refer you (they won’t know you want them to unless you ask) – then their ‘friends’ will have a look at you and decide for themselves whether the referral was justified and relevant to them. The only way they can do that is if you have great content that has value for them to solve one of the problems in their lives… then they will refer you onto others ad infinitum – all for the cost of actually putting some quality content on your site.

Steps to quality content

Who are you talking to?

As in all marketing devices, know your target audience and tailor your communications to them. Identify your target groups by asking existing customers how they came to discover their need and then find you.  Maybe invest in some general market research.

How should you talk to your audience?

Work out the words that your audience are using to find you on the WWW. You can do this through the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You put in a phrase that you believe is most closely associated with your services and a list of keywords related to that search is delivered.

Don’t take for granted that you know all the ways your customers may search for you. By thinking laterally and broadly, many customers may come from an entirely different direction. For instance, a crafty person who is time poor may search generally for embroidery patterns in the hope of finding some new, simple, fast patterns. The owner of a website which sells ‘punch embroidery products’ which happens to be a faster embroidery technique would do well to have keywords for general embroidery and ‘quick crafts’ etc, rather than just ‘punch’ as the user may have never heard of the term ‘punch embroidery’.

One of the best ways to circumvent our inability to grasp all the possible permutations of how users seek us is to use the Google Webmaster Tool of ‘Top Search Queries’. This shows you the actual keywords that your visitors searched on to come to your site. Often it is surprising the choice or words used.

What will you say?

If you are passionate about your business, you will probably find that you or your team have certain expertise that no one else has access to. Writing well researched, unique articles makes for brilliant reading and improves the usability and attractiveness of your site to both your users and correspondingly to Google.

Consider leveraging your clients to write for you, give you great reviews about your products and services, how they have been used or how they have impacted on the lives of your clients. Be innovative in how you view your offerings – a great website for a lemon juice manufacturer includes all types of cleaning advice that uses the juice, not just culinary uses.

No matter how clever, beautiful or advertised your website is, nothing is more important than your content. When you have good, useful, clear content, the wording that this involves will be always relevant to your page subject matter. It will also generally be the words and phrases that your target market is searching on and thus more will find your site, click on more pages and stay for longer. Using these principles, your site will increase its reputation with users, as well as gain in search engine visibility.

With exceptional content you look after your end users and that in itself will look after your website, your brand and ultimately, your business.

This is the first in a series of articles targeted at those of you who genuinely want and need to ensure your websites are useful marketing tools and relevant to your target audience. The end result of achieving this is that you will be utilising best practice SEO and will garner high rankings within Google and other search engines.

These tips will make it easier to let search engines such as Google crawl, index and ultimately understand your content, which is the key to putting your site in front of the highest number of interested users. Where sites are ranked in Google (or other search engines) when a user searches is known as “organic search results”.

Improvement in organic search results is generally a combination of many factors. More often than not, it is the response to many small incremental changes. Each change individually seems inconsequential, but taken with all the other optimisations, they will gradually improve your rankings.

The first lesson you need to understand is that Google is not your target market; your visitor is your target market. Write for the visitor and not for the search engine (see this article “Write Content for your visitor, not search engines“). Your visitors are only using search engines such as Google because they want to find you, what you do, or what you sell. By being totally focussed on rankings, you may completely alienate your customer group.

An example may be to ‘stuff’ your copy with words that you believe will be highly ranked. You may end up with a sentence such as:

‘If you want new cars come to Peter Smith Cars Wentworth, we have new cars with car stereos; we have new cars with new tyres and new cars with new widgets. We also sell used cars with finance available. Our used cars have had free second hand car checks and come with a used car warranty and have all been sprayed inside with patented ‘new car smell’. We trade in used cars for new cars…’

You can see that this paragraph is repetitive, not very user friendly and really tells the user almost nothing. It is simply a list of every car sales keyword the copywriter tried to fit in. If the entire page consisted of similar material, not only would this be unattractive to users, but may also be very poorly ranked in Google for repetitive content and keyword stuffing.

Look out for our next article on Tips for Better SEO which will focus on the beginnings of web site structure.

By John Alexander

Two of the most important writing skills that makes your web site successful are:

1. Maximizing your visibility within search results to your ideal buying audience (being easily found.)
2. The delivery of a message that compels your visitors to respond to what they find. (action is taken as a result.)

While we tend to spend many hours fine tuning our SEO related skills to gain top visibility, far to many people never grow their skills enough in this second area. Writing words for the Web that result in the desired action being taken is as equally important as gaining top that top visibility for your researched keyphrases.

Writing for your readers is not less important than writing for search engine friendliness. You absolutely need both if you want to be profitable.

So for today’s article I want to give you some tips that you can apply in your practice of optimization that will also help you learn to communicate better or as I like to say, connect to the heart of your readers. You need to be easily found by people searching but you also must take that traffic and make use of it so that your Web site becomes profitable. There are a variety of ways you can write words and dialog that will help you hit home every time. Before we discuss a few of these, let’s briefly identify a few common errors in Web communications today.
Errors in Writing for the Web:

For the sake of this article – it is not JUST about SEO influences anymore and has not been for some time.

In my opinion, the most common error that people make when they put their Web pages together, is the aspect of “self focus.” People are often not aware of how much their Web copy may dialog about how they are the most experienced, or they are the best, or they are going to sell you something of exceptional value.

This type of dialog:

• We are the best
• Us
• Ours
• Our program
• Our service
• We have the best…etc…etc.

Is not nearly as powerful as focusing on words that speak to the reader:

• You can enjoy
• You will appreciate
• Your choice is all that counts
• You’re going to appreciate etc..ect.

By working with dialog that is “customer focused” you are creating content that reads for voice, nearly like broadcasters write for radio or TV. Your Web page needs to communicate and flow smoothly with this type of customer focus, especially if you hope to connect with your readers in a way to do business.

The next biggest error is probably that people often fail write in a very compelling call to action. If you want people to take action, you need to communicate that call very well and never assume that your readers will ever follow through to your objective because they should just naturally do so. They won’t, unless your dialog makes your communication compelling. By compelling, I don’t mean pushy. You help them to understand the genuine benefits and you educate them about the value of the offer in such a way as to allow them to make a buying decision.

Let’s talk about some different ways that you can write your words to communicate and compel response.

Writing Words for the Web and how to connect to your readers:

• Never make the error of assuming that someone reading your offer will automatically connect the features of your product or your service to the benefits. They won’t, unless you dialog about it in such a way that will help them see every benefit.
• When you write a page, try and think in terms of writing to communicate, rather than writing to impress. Many of us learned sentence structure and the mechanics of putting together sentences or paragraphs in the proper way back in school. But how many of us were ever taught how to write words to really communicate what we mean.
• Don’t be a “sesquipedalian” writer (or a writer who is given to the overuse of long words)
  Perhaps some people would feel that the best way to impress their reader was to use overly complex terminology (maybe to demonstrate how intelligent they are) but unfortunately if you constantly write with the overuse of long, multi-syllable words – it will not help you connect to your readers.
• When you are writing your content, try and keep it simple, customer focused dialog that is written to help the reader understand what you are saying.
• Give ample time to developing the Title of your page (not just for keywords, but to say something compelling.)
• Most writers of sales related pages never offer nearly enough benefits. How many benefits are best?
  Let’s put it this way, don’t ever stop looking for new benefits that you may have overlooked. Remember that very often, it is as the reader is reviewing the value of the benefits, that they make their decision that they want to buy your product.
• Is there a place in your Web copy where you can use phrasing with a little humour?
• Is there room in your content to reflect a little story that demonstrates your point?
  Story telling can be very effective if it is well written and flows to illustrate a point you are making.
• Can you think of a way to tie your content into something metaphorical?

A metaphor is a figure of speech that suggests a likeness or similarity but offering a description that is not literally applicable.

Examples of Metaphors:

• the heart of a lion
• time is money
• a blanket of snow

Remember the importance of a call to action.

General examples of “calls to action:”

• “If you’ll do me a favor of filling in this form, I’ll extend your 30 Day trial Offer by another 30 days. That means you can test the program for a full 60 days before you decide whether you’d like to keep it.”
• Send for a copy right now and judge for yourself how much is worth to you compared with the few tax deductible dollars it costs.
• Most people who have made money and become successful have done so because they took action at the right time. If you’re ready to take action, it’s your first step to getting this very powerful new strategy to use as you please for your business.
• Okay, if that makes sense, then stop – walk over to the phone right now and give me a call at 1-800-XXX-XXXX.

A call to action should direct the reader to take what ever action you have identified that will make the page you created successful in meeting an objective. It may not always be about sales. It is up to you to determine the objective of the page.

Other Types of Writing Tips for the Web:

• Take you time in writing your Web content. Sometimes by writing over a period of 48 hours will give you more times to digest exactly what you are trying to communicate. You may even find yourself coming back to restructure your content to add more value, after sleeping on it for a bit.
• Remember that 2010 is the “year of the writer” if you are making a transition to the Web. There has never before been such great opportunities for writers as there are this year. The Web needs good copy writers who know how to communicate well.

Try and make a habit of writing consistently for the Web.

Article Marketing is considerably different than writing general content or FAQs. Writing for news is different again.

About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses. John is author of an e-book called Wordtracker Magic and has taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world wide. John’s articles can be read in publications like REALTOR Magazine, Search Engine Guide, WEBpro News and many others.

This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons License.

By John Alexander

Do you think your web pages say exactly what you mean to say to your visitors. Obviously, you probably think they are communicating well to the visitor and if your website is working well, generating leads or making plenty of sales, then perhaps you are communicating well.

For the first part of this article I want to talk to those of you who may NOT be doing so well with your website.

Most of the time, people like to talk about the search engines and better visibility but once you begin to gain that visibility, the next question that presents itself is why are more people not buying from me?

Let’s start by talking a little bit about the writing style of your web pages. When you write for the Web you want to include a variety of words that like building blocks, form a proper flowing dialogue to communicate the message that carries the meaning you intend to deliver.

So what’s the big deal with writing dialogue?

The fact is that most of us who were educated in the public school system, were taught with a focus on spelling, sentence structure, grammar and some writing and yet very few of us were ever encouraged or really taught how to write for the sake of “communication.”

Indeed we were taught to write to “sound intelligent” which usually meant a principle of the bigger the words we use the better. But in the world of Web copy, we find that most readers do not want to look at a lot of extraneous content that detracts from the message.

In fact what most Web users want is just to just simply understand exactly what the meaning or benefit of the message is to us. Is there something here for me or is there nothing here for me. The sooner your visitor understands the meaning of what you are saying on your Web page, the sooner they are likely to interact or respond to your call to action.

Often when you glance at a web page, your eyes may not even know where to begin if it has a poor layout or is poorly written. But a page that is well crafted usually has a good solid headline that reads well and immediately gets the reader flowing into the message.

Writing Tip 1. The power of a good headline delivers on benefits and understanding.

Often a good headline is written to eliminate confusion and add some punch to exactly what the web page is all about.

Many professional writers spend as much as 20% to 50% of their time crafting their main headline because they know the importance it holds. Your headline not only starts the page but it may often be reflected in your Title Tag which is also what users see in the search results.

What types of headlines work well?

Develop headlines that appeal to as wide of an audience as possible:
How to capture one of the largest target audiences ever – Women
Cool Tools – that are also free!

Remember to create headlines that reflect the benefit of an article:
Keyword Research – Shift Your Focus to employ A more Lateral Thinking approach

Remember the power of the numbered headline:
15 Keyword research Tips for finding the Hottest Niche Phrases Quickly
The Use of Muscle Words. . . 148 power words designed to draw your customers in
25 ways to Add Quality Content to Your Web Site

Remember that showing numbers as numerals is more effective than showing numbers written out.
“25 ways” is more effective in a headline than for example, “Twenty five Ways.”

Remember to use good descriptive words in your headline:
Reigning Keywords – A Quantum Leap in Learning to Explore Legitimate Data
Easy Tips for Adding some Zest to your Click Through Ratios

Writing Tip 2. Learn how to cut down on the long-winded introductions and get right to the valuable content.

So often when people first start creating their web content it’s nearly like they are trying to fill up empty space. In the early days of the web, the business owner might think to themselves “I need to come up with several pages of content for my website so perhaps I’ll load my site up with the things that we have already produced.”

Then you often found that early websites were loaded with “filler material,” corporate brochure material, mission statements and other existing material that really was of very little interest to the user. The only trouble is, that your website needs to be built up with content that is genuinely useful to the visitor and highly valuable content based on the needs that your searching customers are looking for. The cost of creating fresh, original, high quality content has it’s price, but you are paying an even greater price if you are filling your Web site with extraneous low quality content that is just taking up space and distracting your readers.

Writing Tip 3. Learn how to shift from a traditional “print related” writing style to a “voice related” writing style.

We don’t speak to each other the way we normally write. By the term “writing for voice” I am referring to writing similar to the way a professional broadcaster writes for their listeners. Have you ever noticed the difference between copy for traditional print and copy written “to be spoken by voice?” The difference is in the delivery and the style of writing. Printed copy tend to be written with much less customer focus and because it is in print, the reader has the option of going over a story a second time. Broadcast copy that is written for voice, is written with much greater focus on the listener because it is written to be spoken only once. If it is not communicated well the first time, you’ve missed it because on the radio you generally can’t rewind or replay what you’ve just heard.

When you write your Web copy, particularly if it is a sales letter, learn how to write your copy so it is extremely customer focused. Instead of talking so much about your services, talk “to the reader.” Test your copy to see whether it reads like the voice of a friend talking to you.

Example:

Instead of: saying “Our years of service,” talk about the same benefits using the words “you” or “yours”
Instead of: “Our 20 year guarantee,” you might talk about “a guarantee that….gives you 20 years of peace of mind.”
Instead of: “We can,” make it “you can.”
Instead of: “We will,” make it “you will.”
Focus on words that allow all of the emphasis to be on the reader NOT your company.
You, you’re, yours, you will, you can enjoy, you can experience, you can benefit by

10 more general writing tips specifically for your fashioning your web page content:

• For readability, avoid complex sentences. Try to phrase your thoughts as simple as possible.
• Make sure you say exactly what you mean.
• Try writing with an “active voice” instead of a “passive voice.”
• Don’t make your paragraphs too long – but make them smaller and easy to absorb.
• Try to work on eliminating sentences if they are unnecessary or don’t contribute meaning.
• Try to always write in present tense.
• Choose either Verdana or else an Aria font for easy reading.
• Always write dark text on a light background for easiest reading.
  (Light text on a black or dark background is harder on the eyes and tends to sparkle.)
• Try to avoid using industry specific acronyms and/or jargon.
• Links in your body copy are favorable providing what you are linking to is relative to your readers interests.
  (For example linking to someone’s blog post or to a resource or a source that your article is referencing.)
• Remember that there are different types of content and they each require a little different focus.
  Example: writing press releases need to be newsworthy or related to hard news.
  Example: writing a sales letter – needs strong customer focus copy
  Example: writing articles – should always be written for the reader first

Writing Tip 5. Remember your message needs a strong call to action

So many times we can publish something but once we come to a conclusion, it’s like we forget to tell the reader what we would like them to do next. If you don’t simply include an instruction at the end of your content, don’t assume the user will ever take any action at all. It sounds simple but many people forget this simple step.

What do you want your customer to do at the end of your page?

Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Don’t forget to tell them.
Do you want to give them more resources? Then give them a link and make it easy for them.
Do you want them to call you? Then tell them to walk over to the phone and give us a call at 1-800-Whatever

In conclusion:

As you work on writing your Web content to better convey useful, high value information that is of genuine interest to your readers, you’ll also find that the search engines will also gravitate towards favoring your content thanks to the high tech components of artificial intelligence that are working in the background. Spend time your time building useful pages that satisfy the reason why your customers are searching the Web in the first place and reap the benefits of having rich content that will stand the test of time.

Would you like to read up on issues concerning webusability?

One of the most exceptional experts on Web usability is Dr. Jakob Nielsen Ph.D. who holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

Check out Dr. Nielsen’s Alertbox for loads of excellent advice.

About John Alexander

John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses. John is author of an e-book called Wordtracker Magic and has taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world wide. John’s articles can be read in publications like REALTOR Magazine, Search Engine Guide, WEBpro News and many others.

This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons License.