Usable Words

From Peter Da Vanzo, a very welcome new contributor at Aaron Wall’s essential SEO blog, comes a great introductory post on SEO for regional domains. Definitely worth a look for my fellow Australians (or Unamericans of any description).

SEO copywriting master Heather Lloyd-Martin tells you Why keyword density is crap. (I might quote that title to the next person who asks me if I “do” keyword density.)

The guy who wrote Title tags for dummies does the same thing for meta descriptions. These 2 posts won’t get you a top Google rank by themselves, but at the very least they’ll make your Google listings a lot more clickable for people who happen to find them.

OK, so you’ve managed to attract a bit of traffic to your website, and you’ve been clear enough about what you’re on about so that you’re on the shortlist of your target customers. What next?

Well, what’s next is that they choose you over anyone else on the shortlist. Duh. And there are two basic things you need to do for this to happen:

1. You need to convince them that you understand their problems and you can make them go away. (Even one of their problems would help.)
2. You need to convince them that you can do the above better than anybody else.

In other words, the way to get people to choose you is to make it all about them.

In the next post in this series, I’m going to be talking a bit about point 2, convincing people that you do it better than anybody else. But for now let’s concentrate on point 1, convincing them you can make their problems go away.

What we’re fundamentally talking about here, as many of you will have realised, is selling benefits, not features. In other words, don’t tell people what you do, tell them how you can help them. In the classic formulation, people don’t care about you, they want to know “what’s in it for me”.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. There is a lot of stuff out there about using benefits to sell. I mean, really a lot, and most of it is just some variation on “Tell the prospect what’s in it for them. There, you’re now a copywriting genius. Give me $100.”

So yeah, really important principle no doubt, but do I have anything original to say about it? Maybe one day I will, but in the meantime, let me direct you to two of my favourite posts on the subject, by Sonia Simone at Copyblogger. Sonia suggests you bait the hook with emotional benefits, then reel them in with logical benefits, a formula I’ve found extremely useful.

So go and read Sonia. When you come back, you will be a copywriting genius (and not even $100 poorer), and you’ll be ready for me to tell you how to convince people you’re special. Because you are.

Image: mackz

When a potential customer is in a desperate situation, you need to let them know you can help.

Clearly.

And quickly.

If you can be the first person they hear this from, they become the easiest kind of person to convert into an actual customer. They won’t compare you to your competitors. They won’t baulk at the ridiculous price you charge for an emergency service. They just want the pain to go away.

…OK, all that’s pretty much common sense, right? But if it’s common-sense advice, why don’t people build their websites around it?

Here’s an example. I’ve been working with this one client. Let’s just say they’re a dentist. (They’re not a dentist. But I don’t want their competitors Googling this post and stealing my common-sense advice amazing copywriting secrets, and for my purposes they’re a bit like a dentist, so let’s pretend.)

Now, dentists have two kinds of customers. Well, more than two, but permit me to simplify. They have the kind of customer who can make an appointment in a week’s or a month’s time – the kind who is obediently attending their six-monthly checkup, or having their teeth whitened, or whatever.

Then there’s the kind of customer who needs an appointment right now. This customer has a toothache, and will pay absolutely anything to make it go away.

Well, here’s what I found when I looked at my client’s competitors’ websites: all of these “dentists” have an emergency service. They will actually come out to your place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and fix your toothache. (If only real dentists did that!)

But none of them – at least none of the ones I looked at – so much as mentions this service on their home page! Instead, the home pages were all (the equivalent of) “porcelain veneers this” and “gold fillings that” – services that are money-spinners for the dentists, sure, but not services you want to have to scroll through when you are in screaming agony and just want to know if someone can help.

So, my advice to the client? “Mention your emergency service in big letters right at the top of your home page. Put it in your meta description too. Give people your phone number, and tell them to call you any time. That way, when someone with a horrible toothache Googles up a dentist, they’ll immediately know you want to hear from them. (SEO permitting, of course.)”

Turns out this client’s web developer had already suggested the same thing (smart fellow!), so I can’t actually take credit for the idea, but that doesn’t matter. A good idea is a good idea. Of course, it might mean these clients get a lot more calls at 3 in the morning from desperate people, but they assure me they’re up for that!

[Update: And here, courtesy of my email inbox, is an actual dentist who definitely gets it.]

Image: trialsanderrors

How do you handle rejection?

If your answer is along the lines of “I curl up into a ball and whimper”, it’s probably just as well you can’t see what happens when people look at your website or see it listed in search engines. Because most of the time they take one look, shrug their shoulders and go “Next!”.

It’s a truism that web users have short attention spans. Perhaps this is exaggerated sometimes. But when it comes to searching for a product or service and “shortlisting” a few possible websites, you really do only have a few seconds to convince someone that they really, really need you.

So what can you do to make sure they make the right decision? read more >