Category: Copywriting

If you’ve ever wondered what a landing page is and whether your website needs one, you’re not alone. There are plenty of discussions around the planning, designing and using landing pages online, both in blogs and on social media. Answers vary from a landing page being your site’s home page, right through to a page with a strong call to action. However, the truth is, a landing page is a page on your website you have deliberately created to capture leads.

Understanding How a Landing Page Works

Each landing page has a clear goal: to collect the essential details from your visitors. Rather than trying to sell your visitor your product or service, you are providing them with something so valuable they are happy to share their contact details with you. What you provide is called a lead magnet. A lead magnet can range from an eBook, a cheat’s sheet, a downloadable template or a checklist. It has to be something related to what your business offers and which the visitor sees as being valuable and something they want! You then tell them what they need to do to get the lead magnet, called the call to action.

Let’s take a look at how the lead magnet fits into the workings of a landing page:

  • Your visitor is directed to your landing page, usually from a paid advertisement
  • They are presented with an irresistible offer; your lead magnet and a strong call to action telling them to enter their details into a form on the page
  • Your visitor enters their details, usually name and email address, which converts them from being a visitor or being a lead
  • Their information is stored in your leads database
  • Your lead is directed to a thank you page where they receive the lead You can also include other calls to action here, such as to check out your blog or contact you
  • You contact your leads to build up a solid relationship with them and to market your products or services to them

Why Using Landing Pages is Important

The number one reason why you need a landing page is that it generates leads for your business. It is much easier to sell to someone whom you have already developed a relationship with, demonstrated your competence and who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. A lead has voluntarily given you their contact details because they were interested in your lead magnet. They are a warm lead and ready and waiting to become your customer or client!

Landing pages will also help you:

  • Collect information about your visitor’s demographics
  • Provide a place for you to present your best offers
  • Show you which offers or lead magnets work best with your target audience
  • Let you test out different aspects, such as your copy, images and keywords

When creating a landing page, all other distractions must be removed to maximise the leads you receive. The copy must also be meticulously written and tested to ensure maximum conversion rates too. We can help you with both of those here at FutureLab. Our web developers will build and design you the ideal landing page, with our copywriting team providing irresistible copy. We’ll take care of the testing and monitoring of the results from your pages, plus establish a high performing digital marketing program for it too.

For further information or to begin the process of custom building your new landing pages, please contact your FutureLab team now!

You may think that developing and maintaining a website for your business is over once you’ve flipped the switch and introduced your new website to the world. Sure, there’ll be the odd product to update but that’s all the effort you need to put in, right? Not so. Developing a website for your business takes time and effort – which doesn’t stop once the web developers are finished.

The truth is, keeping up a good flow of traffic to your website involves keeping your website up to date too. The search engine robots that decide what results to show to each user like to see that a website is fresh, with new content added and interaction happening on the page. That sends the message that your website is working and more importantly, that users are finding something of value there too. The higher the quality and utility of your website, the higher it will be placed in the average search result.

What can improve the quality and utility of your website? Web copywriting.

Copywriting, especially for the web, encompasses a whole range of activities and therefore can be easily misunderstood. Web copywriting for your website could include writing the text for your homepage, all your website pages, writing a blog, writing guest posts on others’ blogs and linking to your website, writing advertisements for use with Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, writing your Christmas e-card, or digital newsletters, email campaigns, articles or research posts. What unites all these various activities, is that web copywriting, like copywriting for print, is designed to increase brand awareness and sales for your business.

How could blogging increase my sales?

It might not seem at first glance like blogging would have anything to do with customers buying your products or services. The relationship isn’t as simple as a straight line from blog post to checkout.

For example:

Imagine you own an online store selling children’s toys, and you write a blog post entitled ‘Top ten toys and games for Christmas’ on the 1st December.

You know that there are plenty of parents searching for Christmas gifts for their children, and that they might be stuck for ideas. Your blog post mentions how difficult it can be to think up new ideas for children’s Christmas presents, then outlines ten gifts that are ideal to buy depending on what your child enjoys. For example, the latest board games for groups of kids, puzzles for the brainboxes, Lego for the hands-on children, etc. After each idea, you might provide a link to each category of toy or game on your website. At the bottom of the blog post, you also feature some products related to the article.

There are two categories of people who might find and read this article. There are those who are already browsing your online store, who see your post and read it for ideas. Then there are those who actually arrive at your site via the blog post. They might have actually searched ‘top gifts for kids’, and clicked on your article in the search results.

For both categories of reader, you are providing informative content, while also giving handy suggestions and links to your products. Either way, you are increasing your chances of a sale, and making your website and brand memorable to those readers – who might just come back next time they are looking for a gift.

How about if you don’t sell products online? Well, it’s not only ecommerce stores that can benefit from producing quality online content.

Let’s take a car mechanic who has a simple website advertising their business. They start a blog and write articles about how to care for your car, simple car problems you can fix at home, how to prepare for a long car journey, and so on. The company are writing using their specialist knowledge and helping people care for their vehicles.

The benefits are threefold. First, their existing customers might appreciate the extra help with looking after their car, and be more likely to become loyal to that mechanic – establishing an ongoing relationship and not tempted to shop around based only on price. Second, simply having the articles online means that they will start appearing in search results related to the key words and phrases in the each article. That a) means you have more pages, therefore more opportunities to be found online, and b) brings in new users who are searching for far more than just ‘car mechanics Auckland’. Lastly, the more time is spent on your website, the higher quality that it will appear to be to the machines who count these things. That will give your website yet another boost up the search engine rankings.

This cycle is repeated every time the mechanic posts a new article. Each new page is a new opportunity to target fresh customers.

What can web copywriting do for my business?

 

Writing a blog for your website does ALL of the following:

 

  1. Provides quality content for your website browsers to read and engage with. You can heighten this by including a comments section below each blog post, sharing each post via your social media accounts, inviting others to write guest posts on your blog etc.
  2. Helps establish your company’s appearance as a leader/expert in your industry. Your content is informative, helpful, and keeps readers coming back for more advice/tips/research findings.
  3. Provides huge opportunity to increase website traffic (as we saw in our car mechanic example).
  4. Increases awareness of your brand and encourages brand loyalty. The more you interact with your customers and provide something for them to engage with, the more likely they will remember you above your competitors.
  5. Brings in readers who might not have otherwise found your website – therefore increasing your potential sales base.
  6. Establishes your website as a site generating quality content and real user interaction, thereby boosting your chances of appearing higher in search engine results, and being found by more people.

 

It’s clear to see now how something simple like blogging on your website can actually boost your business and provide tangible results to your bottom line. Blogging doesn’t have to take much time – you can choose to get staff or the company owner to write relevant content on there, or employ a professional copywriter to contribute regularly to the blog. The upside of a copywriter will be they already understand how to use keywords and write about relevant content designed to appeal to your target market or increase the likelihood of a sale. Plus of course, outsourcing this work leaves your staff free for other tasks. However, if you’ve got one or two willing staff members who have both flair and enthusiasm for writing, you may well want to take advantage of your in-house talent!

If launching a blog is a bit much right now, at least make sure the content on your website is optimised to draw customers to your site and keep them there. Web copywriting for this purpose is especially important on your home page. Investing in a professional copywriter is worthwhile to help sell your brand, your company personality and values, and of course your products and services. A good copywriter will research your industry and use relevant, appropriate keywords to help customers find you online. The benefit of using a web copywriter specifically is that they’ll be familiar with how to upload the content to your website and optimise your web pages too – for example, using meta titles and descriptions, good image titles, and putting the more important keywords in headings and titles. (If you want to learn more, read our post on basic SEO for business websites.)

The benefits of copywriting for your website

I think we can all agree that bad web content is just as irritating as bad web design. Website content with typos, spelling errors – a homepage that doesn’t immediately tell you what the company does/produces, content that’s hard to read, in varying fonts or just waffles on with no important information… we’ve all experienced frustration and annoyance when stumbling across these types of website ourselves. Make sure your own website isn’t committing the same sins!

Investing in good copywriting for your main website pages is just as important as creating other content such as articles and blog posts. To start with, you want customers to find your website, understand what to do when they get there, and make it easy to buy a product or service, get in touch with you, and find your location. That is the most simple, and essential, job that your website content should be doing.

After that, you want your web copy to reflect your brand values and tell your story. What does your company do that is different from your competition? What makes you stand out? Why should someone pick your products or services? What was your road to success and what do you value as a company today? These are all questions that a web copywriter can help you answer in a way that inspires trust, loyalty, and a connection with your customers.

If you’re looking for more advice on copywriting for websites, you can contact us or ask for a quote.

First things first: if you need to learn what SEO is and how to use it, catch up here. Search engine optimisation, or SEO for short, is hugely important to your website. It can mean the difference between driving a good amount of traffic to your website, and withering away somewhere in the murky depths of the internet where no one can locate you. We’ve talked previously about writing titles and descriptions for each page of your website, making sure each one gives a short, clear idea of what that page is about. No keyword stuffing, using full phrases or sentences and a unique description for each page.

Now let’s go into a little more detail on some other techniques you can use to optimise your website.

It’s all about great website content

We can’t say this enough – to have a great website, you need to have great content! Search engines scan your site, rate your website’s quality, and use this as a factor to determine where your site should rank when users type in a search query. Google tells us your landing page should have ‘relevant, useful, and original content’. This is a rather broad statement, so let’s unpack it a little.

RELEVANT

You want your potential customers to be able to find you. Think about what they might be typing into Google or another search engine in order to look for your products or services. This isn’t necessarily about what makes the most sense to you – but what makes the most sense to the average Joe, who may not be as computer-literate as you. So while the keyword ‘electronic music genre’ might make perfect sense for your independent record store, your average customer might be searching anything from ‘best electronic beats 2014’ to ‘latest EDM’ to ‘song by Skrillex on the radio now’. Research shows that search queries are getting longer, and you want to ensure you’re catching all your potential customers by including many broad and specific keywords in your website content. Taking our record store example, you might want to mention both ‘electronic music’ and ‘top electronic songs’ on your page dedicated to the genre of electronic music. If search engines find content on your website that matches or is similar to a user’s search query, they are more likely to display your website in the search results. Also, the more times that search query appears in your site, the more likely the relevant page is to show up higher in the results. Make sure to scatter your most important keywords throughout your site, integrated into content that makes sense. Finally, is your content what users would expect to find when they visit your site? Make sure you don’t mislead your customers with unrelated information. Organise your site with each page dedicated to one topic, and don’t be tempted to dilute a page with extra content that doesn’t belong there.

USEFUL

Do users find the information they are looking for when they browse your website? Do they stay around, read and click through to other pages, or do they leave straightaway? These are your website’s ‘bounce rate’ and ‘dwell time’, and they are factors that helps search engines decide how to rank your site. How long a user stays on your website, and whether they click through into any other pages on your site, are measured by search engines. A user that stays longer on your site and has a look at other pages appears more satisfied than a user who leaves your website after say 10 seconds. Your website is graded according to these standards. While you can’t make every user stick around for half an hour, providing clear and helpful information can certainly improve your chances. If you’re selling a product, some useful information to provide could be product descriptions, product reviews, pricing, shipping information, whether an item is in stock… all helpful to someone deciding whether or not to make a purchase from your company website.

ORIGINAL

Firstly, duplicating content across your own site is a bad idea. Search engines don’t like it, and it could penalise your ranking – meaning that your website won’t appear as high up in search results. However, there are some legitimate reasons for duplicating content across your site. There’s just a couple of technical things you need to do in those cases – no follow the duplicate page, and get a rel=canonical from the duplicate page to the original page. That way, Google knows not to index the duplicate content. A good web developer will make sure to implement these and other SEO-friendly techniques for you, if you’re not maintaining your website yourself.

Secondly, you want to provide your own content on your website – not someone else’s! By all means, share and link to informative and relevant content from around the web. But be careful not to simply copy and paste content without any acknowledgement of the original source. If you do this over and over, Google may view you as spam. It’s far better to create your own compelling content, mixed with links to great content around the web.

As we said, after creating your titles and descriptions, great content is really the next biggest factor in achieving a wonderful website that both your users and the Google bots love! Spend the majority of your time allocated for SEO in improving your content for best results. It’s worth putting in the effort now to reap the rewards further down the line! There are a few final items to take note of in creating the best search engine optimised website:

Create links to and from quality websites to increase your ratings with Google

Linking to other websites and having websites link to your content is a great way to show Google your website is alive, trustworthy and worth visiting! It shows that there is some quality content to view on your site which will draw visitors in. Having links to your site also helps Google organically crawl your website, as your website can be more easily found via all the links pointing to it. But, there is one very important point to remember:

NOT ALL LINKS ARE CREATED EQUAL!

For those of you who aren’t familiar, back in the day, links were only a good thing – and that meant that companies would pay for links to be added to web pages and cheap directories in order to boost their ratings. That system came crashing down when Google changed the way they rate links (in technical terms, they changed their algorithm from Panda to Penguin). Now, Google considers the quality of the links from your website, not the quantity. So, the moral of the story is, don’t buy links, and don’t submit your website to low-quality online directories.

Link to yourself

Don’t forget to include internal links within your website! Adding internal links in relevant places helps keep viewers on your site, clicking through your pages, and finding the content they need.

Make your URLs easy

Especially when using a template for your website, you’ll often find that pages have a default URL link filled with numbers, letters and question marks. For obvious reasons, these URLs are not user-friendly. You’re not likely to get a user remembering the web page they are looking for, and in addition those URLs just don’t look good. When you’re creating your website, rename all your pages to reflect the content of that page. Keep it short and memorable. If you’re creating a blog post for example, and the title of your post is long, just pick out the keywords and remove all the unnecessary small words. Use hyphens to separate each word, and keep each URL at a maximum of 4 or 5 words. That way, when readers come to your site, it’s easier for them to find and share your page in the future.

Add descriptions to images on your site

The alt text on an image is a good place to write descriptive text that could include a keyword or two. Since Google can’t crawl images, this is a good way to tell Google what your image is about and how it relates to your content. You can add a caption to an image for added benefit too.

So, for those of you setting out with a new website or looking to improve an existing one, all the above are great places to start. Just remember: it’s 90% about great website content! Optimising your website with good titles, descriptions, memorable URLs and image text certainly help. But once you’ve got interesting and relevant content, the links, sharing and great visibility of your website will follow… and you’ll be sending a clear message to the search engines that your website deserves to be seen!

We won’t sugar-coat it; SEO is time-consuming and requires hard work and effort. You need to be persistent and patient, as the results take time. If you’re feeling completely overwhelmed with jobs and tasks to improve your website, you can call us for help with SEO, web content, or just advice on where to start.