Know your Page’s Goal or Purpose before Writing
There are many reasons why it’s good to develop content for
your website. It gives the search engines more reasons to rank your site high.
It informs potential customers, answers their questions and allays their fears
about ordering products and services from you online.
And with the ever increasing importance of social media,
developing content that’s suitable for distribution through Facebook and other
channels is another reason why it’s good.
When preparing content for your site, you may be trying to
rank for certain long-tail keyword for example.
While thinking about these reasons, many web copywriters may
lose sight of another important, more fundamental goal of a webpage. And that
is whether the purpose of a webpage is to entice someone to visit, return or
continue looking for more on your site, or is the purpose to motivate someone
to take action, whether that’s clicking a ‘buy’ button or signing up for an
e-newsletter for example.
Known as pulling or
pushing, you have to determine this before you type even one word
Each of these types of pages is as different as night and
day. Pages meant to “pull” someone in and keep them there are gifts of sorts
whose purpose is to welcome and inform readers. These pages answer many of the
readers’ “how-to” questions among other things.
Pages written to “push” someone are written in a much
different tone and have a much different purpose. They are for driving someone
to take action. People looking at this content have likely seen the other type
and they’re near the point of purchase. Copy for these pages is generally more
persuasive since you’re trying to get them to make that click or close the
sale.
All of this raises
one question – aren’t all pages supposed to be a little of each?
That’s certainly possible and prudent to move readers from
one page to the next. We all know the importance of including a “call-to-action”
in your copy to keep the reader engaged ON your site.
Say you write an article about some feature of your product
and how it’s useful to solving a particular problem. If you fail to include a “call-to-action”
and the reader gets to the end, they’re not going to know where to go and therefore,
leave your site.
But the big point is to understand the purpose of a page
before writing it. Are you trying to entice new people into your site or are
you trying to motivate them to take action? Don’t simply go at it with the idea
of giving the search engines some great content to gobble up.
This is an important question you need to answer before you
even start writing (…or typing).
Stone Reuning is president and founder of SEO Advantage, Inc., an online marketing firm and website optimization company that helps businesses turn their websites into powerful lead and revenue generation tools.
Beginning with a focus on search engine optimization in 1999, SEO Advantage now brings a full multi-disciplinary approach to each client website. Clients enjoy dominance on Google, Yahoo and Bing through a suite of unique pay-for-performance search engine optimization and online marketing services. Experts in SEO, social media optimization, online reputation management, and website conversions work hand-in-hand with small business owners and client marketing departments providing complete copywriting and creative web design support.
You’ll find SEO Advantage referenced in books such as Writing Web-Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale and the BusinessWeek bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR, as well as popular ebooks like The Small Business Blogging Blueprint.
Hi Stone,
Very important point made here. Conversely, sometimes folks want to do multiple things at once. When someone knows the focus of his or her article is to provide a call to action, all that needs to be done is motivate that reader to take action and not confuse them. This can be done by providing a visible link, icon, registration button etc (depending on how long the content is providing that link 2-3 times within the body) instead of having multiple calls to action.
Good point made 🙂
Dali
This is very good advice ….. and I think, from experince, that lots of companies have lost sight of what that are actually selling. They still believe potential clients are looking for them rather than seeking solutions.
M
It’s easy to say but difficult to do so. I still have trouble to write articles.
I think that you make a really good point.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in creating the content itself without fully considering what you’re trying to do.Having and understanding going in enables the writer to create content with a voice that’s more likely to lead to a successful result. Finally, echoing Dali’s comments (see above) I think that using the KISS method is important in making the user understand what you want them to do next.
Many clients only want the push style pages written and believe that their clients are looking intelligently for their specific products/services. However, in many markets the customer needs educating first, or they come with a definite problem in mind, and this needs addressing before they even get interested in what you have to sell. This is a continual problem for copywriters intent on providing good results.
An FAQs page or a few general information pages can easily be added to most websites, so why not take that bit of extra room to inform everyone — prospects usually have ample opportunity to click a sidebar link to other sales/service pages. The voice may change a little for these pages but its a lot better than having readers going elsewhere for industry info they need.
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