What you write is what you are, especially on the Web.
Yet many business owners only relate their online brands to logos and design, discounting the power of the written word.
Your business communicates its brand with every word you use on your website. Through language, we conceive a personality, set a tone and create expectations — for better or worse.
Good business web writers write for the market, not for themselves.
That’s the point I tried to get across to a former colleague, who has a long history of reporting for various publications. He took exception to my most recent blog entry about ‘plain talk’, in which I stated, it’s important for web writers to put the flowery terms and egos away, and genuinely cater to websites’ audiences.
“Why dummy down my copywriting and limit my prose for others?” was the point he repeatedly made. To churn out his best work, he insisted, he must write for himself.
I respect his points, but speaking specifically about web writing for business, I don’t agree with his approach.
When you’re writing web copy for business, you are assembling the right words and messages to:
Businesses need to dig deeper to connect with customers in the expanding sea of Web 2.0 user-generated content.
The rapid rise of social networking and blogging is churning out information at record rates, creating a flood of independent ideas, views and expressions.
Web authority Technorati reports there are more than 100 million blogs sailing the Web, with 175,000 new blogs diving in each day. What’s more, bloggers are updating these sites with more than 1.6 million posts per day, which translates to more than 18 updates a second.
Too many web designers seem to be stuck in the 90s.
Like glammed-up big hair bands of the past, they’re churning out more flash than substance.
Meanwhile, for more than a decade, Internet experts and users alike have been calling for simple, unobtrusive and accessible designs. It seems straightforward enough: a website that promotes productive and positive online experiences will form a fan base.
Yet, useless Flash intros, superfluous splash pages, confusing menus and difficult-to-detect scroll bars continue to be created. Plus, music — usually of the cheesy genre — is still making users frantically reach for the mute button at the office and home (during the wee hours, when the rest of the household is fast asleep). The list goes on.
To get the right web copy working for your online business, you need to know exactly what market you’re targeting.
For instance, I recently consulted HR firm directors who want to invest in keyword-rich web copywriting to boost their organic search engine rankings. But they’re putting the cart before the horse; they have yet to clearly define their target market.
You can’t optimize your web copywriting with the right keywords if you don’t know exactly who you’re targeting and in what market or region. It turns out they will attempt to incubate a local network, and moving forward they’ll try to make themselves known to select organizations across Canada and the U.S.
Depending on the nature of your business, your SEO copywriting might need to be ‘regionalized’ to reach your target market. For instance, a North Vancouver-based skin care clinic we recently performed work for would have little or no benefit receiving traffic from other cities as all services are performed locally.
Hence, all SEO efforts had strong regional emphasis in a bid to attract local consumers. Again, online visitors from New York would have no value to this client, so we didn’t water down our efforts by targeting global or general terms.
The strategy and effort paid off. Within five weeks, the client benefited from 58 number one positions on the top three search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. In fact, the client reported a significant number of website-generated leads — all made possible by purposefully targeting regionalized keywords and phrases.
As Web 2.0 pulls the rug out from under news distribution monopolies, its interactive element will likely tune in millions more online users.
Not only are more people using the Internet each year (currently 1.17 billion globally, up 225 per cent from 2000), people are naturally drawn by its increasingly interactive nature. The opportunity to participate, even if not acted on, is engaging in itself.
Indeed, Web 2.0 allows users to discuss and influence precisely what’s near and dear to their hearts.
Site after site, poor web copywriting continues to obstruct user experience. The problem is most businesses and organizations tend to treat copywriting as an afterthought.
While reading a newsletter posted by Icograda, I was directed to a poll with the following copy:
Current Opinion
State your opinion. Share your views. Vote on the weekly Opinion poll. Then view the collective results. Just click the check box beside your selection, then click on the “Vote” button.
StrawberryFrog, a global agency with offices in Amsterdam and New York, recently blogged about the impact and future of consumer-generated content.
Tori Winn, Digital Executive Creative Director at StrawberryFrog, gave her take on the future of consumer-generated content, concluding the future is bright.
Indeed, the emergence of consumer-generated content is rapidly empowering consumers. That’s a good thing, and it’s here to stay.
Businesses are starting to recognize it’s not the volume of online traffic, but the quality that counts.
Good traffic comprises relevant visitors who are likely to fulfill a desired action on your website, whether it’s to make a purchase, e-mail or call, subscribe to a newsletter or what have you.
Poor traffic, even in extraordinary amounts, is a waste of bandwidth. No matter how impressive the numbers, the wrong crowd won’t bring you desired results.
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Why do so many businesses lack respect for online customers?
It’s bizarre, especially in this day and age with Internet usage and spending relentlessly on the rise. Perhaps with so many suspect websites hovering in cyberspace, even credible companies tend to lose perspective.
Maybe it’s time to start thinking of visitors as online guests. It’s a simple ‘mind shift’ that might get companies to better recognize how their websites communicate with those they intend to serve.
