Archive for the ‘Writing for the web’ Category
Posted on September 8, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Well. Today certainly has been a day. And it’s only 2:00 PM
Google rolled out Google Instant which modifies the SERPS as users type in their search terms.
My first impression was negative, and I admit it’s because I don’t like change. But it’s also because in a few minutes my brain went all haywire and I realized the ramifications for my industry. If this type of user interface catches on, there will have to be some serious changes in the way I think about keyword choice and optimization for my clients.
“But wait!” you say. “Google said the actual RANKINGS won’t change, just the way in which they’re presented.”
(http://www.google.com/instant/ :
Q: Does this change impact the ranking of search results?
A: No, this change does not impact the ranking of search results.)
While this may be totally true, it doesn’t really matter.
Say, for instance, that my client’s biggest money making keyphrase is “blue widgets from outer space.” It’s the key phrase that brings them the most targeted, conversion-oriented traffic. They were ranking number one for this term (thank you very much) and they were happy as a clam.
Now, with Google Instant, searchers may not be getting past the key phrase “blue widgets” before they are distracted by the shiny changing results parading around in front of them. The kicker is, they might end up clicking on a bunch of these less-focused pages and searching longer on those sites for what they want.
Am I whining because my long-tail, less competitive keyword might not matter as much? Sure. But I also feel like the user’s experience won’t be as enriched by constantly changing SERPS as the big G would like to think. Mostly, though, I feel bad for my client that spent a long time refining their product landing page to exactly fit what the user was looking for only to have it languish, unnoticed (potentially.)
Organic Results Below the Fold.
I’m using my super dorky big monitor right now, so the suggested search box, which used to simply overlay the search engine results but now actually pushes them down the page, allowed three of the organic results to remain above the fold. However, were I on my puny but awesome netbook, those organic results would be buried quite nicely under the paid search results. Sadness pile.
PPC? Impressions? Clickthrough Rates?
I wonder how long it will take before Adwords charges by impression? Hah. The user only has to pause for three seconds in order to trigger a new set of paid search results. Sheesh. Also, consider clickthrough rate as it pertains to quality score. If your impressions skyrocket because someone paused, then finished their search and your add appeared twice, but the quantity of clickthroughs stay the same, that is going to stink.
On the OTHER Hand
Maybe it’s not longtail but short tail keywords that are in for it. I just did a search for Distilled (the brand name of a SEO giant) and came up with a lot of distilled water pages where previously said company used to rank first. I had to search for “Distilled SEO” to get the site I wanted. I also just did a search for blue widgets from outer space. Just for funsies.
What I KNOW Will Change.
The way I include search terms in title tags will definitely change since the title tags (as i see it right now) will be increasingly important.
The way I research keywords and how I construct user behavior models will change. Maybe a little, maybe a lot.
The way I explain the SERPS to clients will change a lot, obviously. Also, I see a further decreased focus on rankings and a stronger focus on traffic metrics used as benchmarks for success.
View Comments (10 Responses) | Categories: Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Writing for the web
Posted on June 3, 2010 by Jim Gianoglio
What does this post have to do with pictures of Batman? Nothing, actually. Other than the fact that we’ll start getting some search traffic from people looking for images of Gotham City’s caped crusader.
What this post is really about is the importance of how you title your blog posts. When I say “title” there are two key elements that I’m referring to: 1) the headline on the page and 2) the title tag (which is often the same as the headline).
Why Batman? Well, he’s the inspiration for this post. You see, way back in 2007 we wrote this post with a few pictures from the eMetrics Summit. It was just a quick, lighthearted post that started out with a reference to Batman. The headline on the page is Batman rules: Pictures from the Summit, and the title tag includes that same headline at the beginning.
To date, we’ve had more than 700 visits from people searching for Batman pictures (there are 57 different keyword variations, everything from batman pictures to pics of batman and even batman in love pics!) In fact, the keyword phrase “batman pictures” is on the top 10 list of keywords that have driven the most visits to our site of all time. It’s #9. I don’t know if that should make me happy, or sad.
What’s the moral of this story? Title your posts carefully! Remember that the title tag/headline of you blog post is one of the most important SEO elements that you have control over. Although it can be tempting to write clever or funny headlines, don’t disregard the impact that they have on bringing in qualified (or in this case unqualified) search traffic.
I’ll leave you with two more humorous examples:
Our post titled So you think you know what your customers love? gets visits from people searching for how do you know when your in love.
Our post titled GA Site Overlay (and a letter to you, Avinash) was visited by someone searching for a letter to you my lover.
Do you have some funny examples of keywords that you get visits from? Share them in the comments!
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Writing for the web
Posted on May 5, 2010 by Robbin Steif
Earlier this week, I got what I perceived to be the strangest survey from Intuit. The survey was about their online backup service.
They asked me questions like, “Please rank which of these four features factor into your use of our backup service.” And then they named all these strange services that I didn’t even know they had, like disaster recovery, or fixing things up once your employee messes up your accounting data.
Finally, I wrote, “I use your service because my jump drives always broke or got too full.” Simple. Easy.
The problem we (like Intuit) often have is that we have super duper services and special features, and we think that our customers care about them, when in fact, our customers might not even know about them. (After all, we spent a year and a lot of money on that Super Duper feature, and now we want to write about it on our websites, no?)
All of which gets down to why qualitative data — surveys and user testing — are so important as we learn to create better websites.
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Surveys, Writing for the web
Posted on April 20, 2010 by Christina Keffer
Recently, I gave a presentation about this topic at SMX in Toronto. I’m going to get a little more mileage out of said presentation by posting the slides and detailed notes here on the LunaMetrics blog.
The difference between Traditional Link Building and Social Media Link Building
The biggest difference between a Social Media link building campaign and a traditional link building campaign is the type of links we’ll be going after.
With traditional link building campaigns, the focus is on links that will help your site RANK higher. Links that pass on link juice, enhance page rank and trust rank and generally improve the strength of your domain. If the links also drive traffic — great. The logic is Links lead to Rankings which in turn leads to Traffic.
Social media links are a horse of a different color. Our goal is to create links that will likely be tagged nofollow and therefore pass very little link juice or provide any benefit to rankings at all. The end result will be the same as ranking higher: Loads and loads of targeted traffic to the site. The logic here is Links lead directly to Traffic.
For the record, I am not saying that ranking is not important. Let me state my opinion here boldly so that I may never be misquoted: Rankings are important! Ranking high for targeted keywords drives lots of awesome traffic to your site! A social media link building campaign should augment your current link building efforts, not replace them.
A Quick Definition of Social Media Sites
The best definition of a Social Media site, or Social Media platform, as they’re sometimes called, is in the slide above. I stumbled across it one day and then totally forgot who said it so unfortunately I can’t cite the original. (If you said this contact me and I’ll link to you!) This definition covers a broad spectrum of sites: Sharing and Community sites are ones like Facebook and Myspace. Review Sites include Yelp and Citysearch. Popularity sites like Digg and Redit rank your content against other content.
Promo sites might be one of the most overlooked social media platforms EVER. They’re sites that post promo codes and deals. Thunderfap, though ineptly named, is one of the best examples of a promo site. Microblogging sites include Twitter and Tumblr. Blogs and Forums are self explanatory. The ones you’ll focus on depend on your industry.
Planning your Social Media Campaign
- Research: The first step to planning your social media campaign is researching where your demographic hangs out online. Are your potential customers (readers, investors, contributors etc.) Tweeting their fingers off or are they lurking around a forum? Or a little of both with some Facebook thrown in. Narrowing down your target sites will go a long way to help you streamline your campaign and ensure that you’re not focusing your efforts on sites that are useless to you.
- Building Your Persona(s): The second step is creating your persona. For the purposes of this blog, a social media persona is a character you create to represent the brand you’re promoting. Unless you’re promoting yourself, you should create a social media persona around your brand and not mix business with pleasure as it were. If you are a vendor and have several clients, lump them into verticals and create a personal for each vertical. For instance, if you have a restaurateur, a kitchen goods retail store and a food blogger as clients, these can all be lumped together in one vertical since the subject matter overlaps. Trying to maintain a persona for each client is a huge mistake because there is no way you can ever do them all justice and still have enough time in the day to take care of other obligations.
- Identify Your Targets: Your targets in this case are the people on the social media platforms that are most likely to disseminate the links that you post. On Twitter, a great target would be a Tweeter who talks about similar things, has a large following and retweets or links often. On Facebook, a related page or group could be a target. On Yelp, people who are dissing your competition can be targets. (Or people talking you down, surprisingly enough.)
- Build Relationships: It all comes down to this. You can’t speak into a void and expect anyone to listen to you. One must build firm relationships online in order to be heard when they speak. If you just randomly @ someone on Twitter with a promo, and they’ve never heard of you before, there is a much smaller chance that they’ll retweet or even follow your link.
- Choose the Best Pages to Link To: If your goal is to bring traffic in and convert it into sales, engaging product pages are the best pages to link to in your Social Media campaign. If your goal is to encourage inbound links of the traditional sort, you need to link to viral pages on your site. Either way, choosing the page to link to is as important as choosing who your targets are.
- Start Plugging, but Stay Classy: It’s important to obey good social media etiquette when you do start linking to your site and encouraging others to pass those links along and drive traffic for you. Don’t just shout about yourself all day, and for Pete’s sake, don’t spam your targets with tons of links. It’s annoying and it will ruin your credibility and destroy any chance of success.
Specific Strategies
This is a Shameless Tease. Now that we have all the theory down, stay tuned for my next post when we’ll put it into practice with specific techniques you can take right from this very blog and apply to your own personal campaign.
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Industry News, Writing for the web
Posted on February 23, 2010 by Christina Keffer
If you own a nail factory, your competitors are other people who make nails right? They make nails to build buildings with and supply contractors who build houses. And they also sell five different shades of green metallic polish and have more sizes of acrylic applications than you. Oh, and how could I forget hoof nippers? How many hoof nippers for farriers do you have, Nail Factory Owner Guy(or Girl)? Did that stop making sense to you? To clarify the issue, here’s the Google search result page for the key phrase “Nail Supplier”
Clearly, the owners of that nail factory had no idea what they were up against online. If they came to me and asked me to tell them why they weren’t ranking higher than their industry competitors even though their websites stunk, I would tell them that their competitor for that term is really EZNails Beauty Supply. After they finished laughing at me, I would try to explain that it’s true because — wait for it — online competitors are not always industry competitors!
But Beauty Supplies? Really?
Yes, really. Online competition transcends the boundaries of industry competition and falls messily into the world of words. Online, a nail factory is not competing against EZnails for market share… they’re not even competing with them for customers. A contractor looking for wholesale 10 penny nails is not going to spend his money buying 10 inch long acrylic claws instead. He’s going to take one look at that results page, sigh in resignation, and refine his search using industry specific terms. What that nail company is REALLY competing for is high rankings for the key phrase “Nail Supplier.” (Incidentally, here is the search results page for the keyphrse “10 penny nail supplier.” Way more reasonable.)
There are other less hilarious instances of industries competing with sites that do not belong to industry competitors. It happens in the medical industry all the time. In a search for “Pediatricians, PA” there is not a single actual pediatric practice until the very bottom of the page.
Pediatricians are competing with these directories for the attention of potential patients. Several of these directories have paid ads so they even make money off the leads.
Now that I know who my online competitors are, what do I do?
There are two options here.
- Beat these sites at their own game. Now that you know what you’re up against, it might be the time for that redesign, or forking over the money for SEO.
- The other, less costly, less time intensive solution is to redefine your online competitive space. Remember that contractor who sighed in disgust and searched for a more industry-specific term? Find those long-tail terms and optimize for them instead of bashing your head against a wall of acrylic nail-selling beauty supply stores.
Both of these solutions involve redefining your web presence to a certain extent. Look at it this way. If you were a mom and pop cake bakery in Pittsburgh and there was another cake bakery across the street, wouldn’t you constantly strive to outstrip them by making sure your window display was better, more artistic, and with more icing in hopes of catching that fickle bridezilla’s attention? Though you’re competing for (and with) words in the online arena, the idea is the same.
Polish your content the way you would polish the glass windows of your store front, since it’s through these portals that your potential customers see who you really are and what you have to offer.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Miscellaneous, Usability, Writing for the web
Posted on January 11, 2010 by Christina Keffer
There are a lot of ways one can make their website into a conversion driving machine. Site design tweaks, endless A/B and multivariate testing, exit surveys (gasp!) are some of the hardest to pull off. However, some of the most obvious usability issues often get ignored. There have been countless roundups of these issues, and a lot of them are really technical in nature.
I’m going to keep this one really simple and try to make these tips as actionable and specific as possible. That might mean that they don’t apply to a specific kind of site, but there’s something here for everyone.
Usability Issue #1: Browser Size and Your Call to Action
Just because you (or your web designer) has a 40 inch wrap-around monitor does not mean that your users do. Making sure that your primary call to action is included at the very top of the page. If you have a variable width website, great. If not, make sure that button/request/link/etc. is close to the top left hand corner. Everyone sees that corner. Additionally, frontload your keywords in your content. The sooner they see the words on the page that likely brought them there, the better.
Usability Issue #2: Where’s the form? You mean I have to do all that?
One of the most important types of conversion for most websites is data gathering. Therefore, one of the most popular soft conversion goals is to have the user fill out an information request form. Whether its demographic information that you’re after or email addresses for your newsletter, you want people to fill out this form.
To encourage users to fill out this form, webmasters are usually willing to jump through some hoops. Maybe they require a form to be filled out to access parts of the site or tantalize users with premium membership perks. However, everyone knows that requiring users to fill out forms is just another barrier surrounding the sale. Added to that, Most of the time, the form is buried more than three pages in the site and is hard to find, and a lot of the time, the form is lengthy and takes lots of time to fill out completely.
This is the point in time when priorities need to be set. What is the the MOST important piece of information that the website it supposed to garner through the form. If it’s the email address (and it usually is) put a simple, three line form on every page of the site. First Name. Last Name. Email Address. That’s it. It’s visible and it’s so brief that filling it out won’t interrupt the user’s experience enough to prohibit them from doing it. If you want age, street address, phone number etc. by all means create that form and bury it wherever you want. But make an abridged version available as many places on the site as possible.
Usability Issue #3: Information Overload
Deciding how to present necessary information in a user-friendly way is a challenge for every website in every industry. It’s usually really hard for webmasters to decide what the most important information is and where to place it. Figuring out the overall purpose of the webpage in question is a good first step.
If the home page is supposed to introduce the company in question and showcase a specific product, limit the information to these two tasks. Keep in mind that your navigation bar will take up space and attention. Keep the copy as sparse and concise as possible and get to the point right away.
Avoid overloading every page with extraneous elements like rotating testimonials, banners and the like. There are specific places for such things, where they won’t detract from your focal elemetns.
Usability Issue #4: Sense of “Place”
Many times, especially with large, multilayer, thousand page sites, the user looses track of where they are and how to get back to something else they were looking at. This problem is not limited to huge sites though, it occurs on the smallest of blogs as well. There are many ways to create a sense of “place” for your user. In my opinion, the most overlooked tool is breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs (horizontal navigation links) are a great, noninvasive way to give customers a sense of place when they’re 8 levels deep on a specific product page or feature list. Breadcrumbs don’t clutter a page up, they don’t eat up a lot of real estate and they provide the added bonus of more anchor text rich links to other pages on your site (if you use them the right way.)
NewEgg.com uses breadcrumbs incredibly effectively, allowing me to navigate from a very specific product page to a more general category page quickly instead of having to find the category all over again in the side nav bar.
Usability Issue #5: Cross Browser Compatibility
If I had a dollar for every site I work on that has elements that work in Internet Explorer but not Firefox or Safari, I’d buy myself some over the knee Prada Boots. If I had a dollar for every site I come across (searching for boots?) that works in Internet Explorer but not Firefox or Chrome, I’d probably be wealthy enough to start my own fashion footware company.
It’s a sad fact that browsers interpret code differently,but that doesn’t change things. Just because you see your site one way doesn’t mean everyone does, and if your navigation is broken or your CSS has text all over the place in one browser or another, you’re limiting your audience drastically and creating a bad name for yourself. Take the time to test the look and functionality of your site across all browsers.
View Comments (16 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Usability, Writing for the web
Posted on October 30, 2009 by Christina Keffer
First, let me start by introducing myself. My name is Christina Keffer, and I’m the newest addition to the team at LunaMetrics. I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to write my first blog post here about a topic that is quite near and dear to my heart: Copywriting.
You have to be a really colossal word nerd to get all hot and bothered by the thought of dissecting web copy in order to find out what sells and why. Lucky for you, dear readers, I am that word nerd, and I’ve come up with a brief tutorial about writing for the web with one eye on user experience and the other on the needs of the search engines.
Most of the time, you can see straight because the user’s needs and those of the search engines are so closely related. Occasionally, however, you’ll become dizzy while trying to keep an eye on diverging necessities. Now before I trip and fall over my own metaphors, here goes nothing.
How can I Use Copy Writing to Increase Conversion?
Wouldn’t you like to know! Actually, all snottiness aside, asking a question that you KNOW your audience will want the answer to is one of the best ways to draw and keep their interest.
On one hand, it’s catchy and brings in a focused audience of webmasters who want to convert traffic to sales. On the other hand, it has the focal keyword “conversion” in it. Do you see that word anywhere else? Cast your eyes to the page title! There it is again.
This is a primary example of how web copy writing can take the users and the search engines into consideration simultaneously.
- By providing a catchy hook, I’ve roped you in and you’re still (hopefully) reading.
- By using a focal keyword in the title and header, I’ve raised the relevance of the page a few notches so that when someone searches for "conversion" the search engines will have a better chance of realizing that this page would be a great addition to their top five results.
- By including the word “conversion” in the body copy, I’m continuing to raise the relevance of the page for that search term.
Am I cheating a little by sprinkling the word conversion around more liberally than sugar in my coffee? You bet. However, as long as my usage doesn’t compromise the user’s experience, cheating a little is OK. Just don’t go overboard with the keyword to content ratio or else you run the risk of getting the site penalized.
The golden rule for using keywords to raise the relevance of your page is including them in the following places:
- Title Tag
- Headers
- Body Copy
- URL
How do I Convert Users Once They Arrive?
Using copy intelligently to increase the relevancy (and rankings) of your site is all well and good. However, once you are ranking highly and traffic starts streaming in, how do you encourage those users to buy your product or fill out your survey or whatever whatever your particular form of conversion is? After all, you know you only have a few seconds (if that ) to catch the user’s attention and draw them in deeper. Here are a few copy writing tricks that will help you.
- Don’t Make Them Think! I can’t stress enough how little patience online users actually have. Keep pages short and simple with the form/ checkout button, etc. very accessible. Use language that is easy to understand and in most cases, avoid technical jargon or corporate-speak
- Be Yourself: Except in specific cases, formal writing comes off extremely stuffy and boring online. Don’t be afraid to insert a bit of your personality into your copy. You’re trying to establish a rapport with your user, and that’s hard enough to do online without raising all manner of linguistic barriers.
- Break Up the Text: In the event that you find yourself forced to include a huge chunk of text for any reason, try to break it up as much as possible. Adding a bullet-pointed list, or a numbered list where you would otherwise have a paragraph is an effective method. Lists draw the eye down the page. Using pictures or graphics is another way to break up text. Using Headers liberally helps as well.
Hopefully these tips will help you on your way to creating dynamic text that will help your users on their way to conversion. Good luck and happy writing!
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Conversion Science, Writing for the web
Posted on January 3, 2008 by Robbin Steif
“You really mix it up, Robbin, don’t you?” LunaMetrician Jason Green joked as he unpacked box after box of Melitta’s Breakfast Blend javapods.
“Well, that’s what you guys drink,” I answered. But in fact, that wasn’t the main reason that I bought all Breakfast Blend. Melitta just didn’t have the information that I needed to distinguish between their products. And I saw the same problem with the user tests we did in December, for a completely different kind of customer.
The problem was that the Melitta site made it too hard for me to buy anything else. I would have loved to try some new stuff, but all those coffee words didn’t mean anything to me.
For example, one of the flavors was, “A Cafe Kind of Day.” The description is, “The forecast calls for smooth and satisfying. The 100% Colombian brew delivers a subtle, wine-like overtone from daybreak to nightfall. Each box contains 18 pods. Fits all Coffee Pod Brewers.”
Seems simple? Not to me. I want to hear, “This is the perfect cup of coffee when you have that mid-afternoon sleepy feeling.” Or, “Just awesome when you crave something as dark as espresso, but can’t get to your machine.” I need some way to differentiate this kind of coffee from “Breakfast Blend.” With Breakfast Blend, I understand one important feature: it is for drinking in the morning. All those other blends — I just couldn’t tell the difference.
This is the same issue I saw last week in user testing. We had a site with product after product, and they were so similar. The owner certainly understood how and when to make a selection, because he knows the product selection intimately. Some of the users, however, were overwhelmed. He needed to tell them when to choose each one — just like Melitta needed to tell me how to choose a flavor of coffee.
Next time, I am going to find a site that has compatible coffee pods, and that tells me what to buy, and why. And we’ll try something new.
Robbin
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Writing for the web
Posted on May 23, 2007 by Robbin Steif
You know how you get to the end of a checkout form, and there is the opportunity to sign up for someone’s email marketing list? Unless you don’t notice it, or you really want to be on the list, you generally don’t check it; after all, who needs more email? So stick with me and see what I saw today.
Here I am, working on DataBazaar’s website (they sell printer ink). And as part of that process, I am pretending to buy a product.
So I get to the end of the checkout process, and instead of saying, “Please add me to your mailing list,” it says, “Please send me money saving coupons.” Talk about great writing for the web. Lots of people have email marketing lists that include coupons, but they tend to be worded in your average boring way: “Please notify me of upcoming coupons via your weekly email newsletter.” (I actually got that one off a competitor’s website.)
Do other people have great ways of asking customers to sign up for their email marketing (that work?) I’d love to hear.
Robbin
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Email, Writing for the web
Posted on August 23, 2006 by Robbin Steif
You can read Part I of this topic here.
Soon after writing about great thank you pages, I had a chance to look at one. We signed another new customer and I started poking around their site to learn more. I filled out a “contact us” form and was awed at the incredible reply. “Thank you for your request for information,” it read. “Your form is being routed to the person who can help you, which will be Jane Smith. She will get back to you in about 24 hours, but if you want to call her yourself, she is at 800-123-4567.” Then they included an opportunity to opt into their email newsletter (so that I would have a second chance to convert that day.) And finally, Jane Smith got back to me by email within an hour or so.
So they gave me a name, a timeline, a phone number and a chance to convert again, all in a sentence or two. And they lived up to their promise.
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Writing for the web
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