Google published its earnings last month, reporting its search result sites generated revenues of $3.40 billion in the first quarter of 2008.

Meanwhile, an iProspect study showed that 60.5 per cent of Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL users selected a natural (unpaid) search result over paid search result as the most relevant on a sample query. Additionally, 60.8 per cent of Yahoo and 72.3 per cent of Google search engine users chose a natural search result as the most relevant.

The conclusion: appearing on natural rankings is most valuable to businesses. Natural search results are more trusted by online users and attract more clicks.

Despite the pressure to become a profit center, most organizations’ customer service and contact centers continue to miss the mark on becoming a strategic business partner and are not considered part of the corporate revenue strategy, noted Forrester Research’s Natalie L. Petouhoff.

However, the research firm added new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations and data are making decisions about positioning customer service for success more relevant than ever before.

“This presents an opportunity for customer service professionals to accomplish goals they may have previously lacked the data to justify,” suggested Petouhoff, adding the transformation of customer service from a “cost center” model to a “profit center” paradigm entails a commitment to change from all levels within an organization — from C-level executives to call center agents.

Customer service leaders can serve their companies well by helping executives decide if customer service is a financial priority, advancing their own leadership and business case development skills, and demonstrating to agents why and how customer service is key to a company’s brand and bottom line.

Rogers Customer Service should take heed.

Web content is not about you. It’s about your prospect or customer.

This is critical to making web content successful. However, based on frequent discussions with business clients and students alike, it’s a concept that’s often not recognized and appreciated.

The digital world has sped things up. Television and billboards have much less impact and ability to influence the masses. There are more choices, more noise. Less time, less patience. As a result, consumers are now exceptionally proficient at ignoring marketing messages.

Effective campaigns are no longer built around clever ads. Today’s successful campaigns comprise clever, relevant ideas, which spread virally. The idea must be about the consumer and his or her needs and wants. Think iPod, personalizing entertainment; or Blackberry, keeping you connected.

The fact is consumers don’t care about your business. Today’s consumer invests time considering your offerings with the mind-set: The world evolves around me. With the advent of the Internet, consumers are in power. And businesses need to respect that.

Next time you review your web content, do your best to look at it from the eyes of your target audience. If you’re not conveying what benefits you have to offer, chances are you’re delivering self-absorbed web content.

If you’re creating web content to turn yourself on, there’s a good chance you’re turning your prospects and customers off.

A Forrester survey revealed what’s really no surprise: almost one-quarter of online shoppers leave websites without registering or purchasing when they are required to register.

The research firm suggests the missed conversions and lost revenues can be minimized by making registration optional, and clearly explaining the benefits customers will get if they do sign up.

“The right incentives can also be helpful — online shoppers are most likely to hand over personal data in exchange for discounts,” suggested Forrester’s Megan Burns.

Additionally, Webcopyplus has found an effective way to achieve registration is to introduce it late in a process, once online visitors have invested time in a task. However, even at a late stage, if too much information is required, it can still lead to both frustration and abandonment.

While there are numerous elements to successful web pages, three are absolute musts and are straightforward:

• Begin every web page with a unique, accurate and explanatory headline.

• Your conclusion must follow. To deliver effective web writing, your web page’s summary, description or key message should be at the beginning of your main copy.

• Use several subheadings or kickers. They should be descriptive, just like headlines, to help your visitors zone in on information relevant to their needs.

The Yahoo Search Blog reported Yahoo is rolling out a major crawl infrastructure upgrade — dubbed Slurp 3.0 — during the coming weeks, which has been suspected due to variances in the search engines crawl behavior.

The search engine upgrades, designed to provide Internet users improved search results, is suspected of providing social sites higher rankings overall.

Your homepage is one of the key pages on your website. It’s often the starting point for visitors and therefore viewed most often. So what should your homepage communicate?

Your homepage should:

• Introduce the purpose and scope of your website
• Set the tone and build credibility

Important homepage elements:

• Header and footer
• Logo and tagline
• Clear menu and table of contents
• Company overview
• Key benefits you offer
• News, events and announcements

Like other pages, keep the design and messages simple, and use small images so the homepage loads quickly. Also, use direct, simple sentences.

Every slight improvement to your homepage’s web content will help you create a good first — and lasting — impression.

While discussing a client’s project, one of the web writers at Webcopyplus suggested breaking up web content does a lot more than promote scanability.

It started a discussion about the additional benefits of segmenting web content into digestible chunks. Here’s what we came up with.

One-topic sentences and paragraphs help web writers:

• Deliver scannable web content
• Layer information (small blocks of text can link to other blocks)
• Organize information effectively (easy to arrange and view)
• Join similar topics
• Provide content that’s easier to remember
• Reduce or eliminate scrolling

Concise web content doesn’t just happen. You need to plan your topics and approach. And once you complete the initial draft, keep cutting away all those dead words!

The extra time you spend or invest in your web content will help ensure your online guests enjoy their stay, complete their tasks and keep coming back for more.

Clients are regularly surprised to find out the web writers at Webcopyplus aim to deliver web content at a grade 8 language level.

The reasons are many: to promote readability, scanability and usability. Simple connects. You decrease the chances of alienating your audience.

While there are exceptions, most target audiences will have varied expertise, in both the Internet and subject matter. A Web or subject expert can endure simplicity, but a novice might not be able to identify with or comprehend complex information.

If your business needs to communicate complicated information, an effective solution is to layer various degrees of details through links. That way, when necessary, your visitors can drill down and get the finer points.

In any case, web writers should always go out of their way to keep web content clear, concise and easy to read. Simple web content translates to more connections and higher conversion rates.
 

Consumers consume information all day long, so it’s difficult to catch their attention with copywriting – forget about influencing them to actually do something.

So, as a copywriter, what choices are there?

Many. But the best one, which proves to work time and time again, is delivering information that’s relevant to the target audience.

Information is communication. Communicate about something that has nothing to do with a particular person’s interest, and you won’t connect. Speak to his or her needs or wants and you get a completely different response.

When it comes to the Web, copywriting isn’t just something you store and retrieve. To engage online visitors, web content must at least touch on topics or issues that are important to the targeted individual.

That’s when web content connects, influences and converts. And that’s when your web content actually works on the behalf of your business.

When creating web content, always go for relevant. It’ll consistently get you the best return.