Timothy Howard
November 1, 2012
Good copy makes a big difference
Website
Content
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Text
Images
Audio
Video
Attachments
Content: Relevant & Searchable
• By Humans
– Easy to navigate with
language geared towards
your customers
• By Spiders
– Search engines use
programs to ‘crawl’
websites to index content
Speak Your Customers’
Language
Nursery
Irrigation System
It’s What You Say & How You Say It!
• Make sure your website content is interesting,
has a purpose, and gives your readers a “call to
action”
– Call us
– Come back
– Visit us
– Tell someone else
– Signup for our enewsletter
– Buy our product
• Online
– Our site or others
• At Retail
– Our place or others
– Signup for our enewsletter
How do calls to action work?
Amount of Information
A Click = ‘Tell me more’
Number of Clicks
Upside Down Funnel Concept
Home Page
All Plants
Plant Category
Plant Detail Page
Home
Page
All
Plants
Perennials
Plant
Details
What Makes Good Web Content?
• Think of a few sites that you like to visit again
and again. What makes you keep coming back?
– Quality Articles
• Current
• Timeless
– Tutorials
– Great Deals
– Fuels a Passion
• Scanable Text is Critical
How to Write Good Web Content
• Keywords. You've worked hard on these keywords; make
them stand out (bold, different font, headlines, etc.)
• Clear titles. Make it painfully clear what you are going to
talk about. It's fun to be clever and cute, but it can
backfire on you. Search engine spiders won’t understand
cutsy puns, sarcasim or out of the ordinary slang terms.
• Be short and sweet. Don’t try to prove you’re a Rhodes
Scholar with polysyllabic words. One key idea per
paragraph.
• Kill the Fluff. Do you like to slog through a bunch of sales
language to get to the meat of a story? Well, neither will
your readers. Don't inflate your writing with a lot of hot
air; keep it down to earth.
Practice makes….
You better than you were before
•
•
•
•
•
Writing quality website content is not easy
You won’t master it overnight
Give yourself some time
Practice a lot
Read a lot
– Other sites – you know good copy when you read it
– Your site – read it from your customers point of view
• Better yet, have other objective people (with a spine) read
it and let you know what they think.
Putting Technology in perspective….
Leading edge can be bleeding edge.
Focus on practical solutions.
Questions?
Comments?
Thank you for your time.
Timothy Howard
Clarity Connect, Inc.
360 Raleigh St.
Holly Springs, NC 27540
timothy@clarity-connect.com
www.Clarity-Connect.com
A copy of all of todays presentations can be found at:
www.clarity-connect.com/presentations
Through Monday, November 4th