It is vital to ensure that your website is optimised for the search engines, but whilst doing this it is important not to lose sight of just who you are actually seeking to attract - real human beings to buy or inquire about your products and services.

Writing copy that sells

When optimising your site, you should ensure that the content not only includes the keywords of most importance for searches and getting high SERPs, but that it also “sells”. Whether this sale is a call to action by your website visitor, eg call us today, sign up to our email newsletter, get the RSS feed from our blog, or it encourages the website visitor to look further at your products, buy, or recommend to a friend, you need to ensure that your copy achieves this. This should be a higher priority than focussing on what the search engines are looking for.

Creating keyword lists of the most searched upon phrases which will deliver traffic to your website is important, as are long tail keywords and terms, but when you incorporate these into your website copy, you should be doing this with a view to ensuring that your copy makes sense and is compelling for your site visitors, rather than satisfying the search engine spiders.

Where to place keywords

Your keywords should be specific to each page, rather than generic for the whole website, and need to be placed in certain places to ensure that they are indexed by the search engines, whilst answering that all-important visitor question:

“What’s In It For Me” - often abbreviated to WIIFM.

Each visitor to your site will have arrived on your website either through a search engine results page, through a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, a link, or through additional marketing methods which have brought them to your site seeking the answers to their questions or research.

It is commonly believed that you have only about 10 secs or less to convince the visitor that they are in the right place on the right website, and after all, the rest of the Web is only a click away. Your headlines, words in bold, copy and images need to answer the WIIFM question in a matter of moments for the user and will therefore also do the job of search engine optimisation.

Landing Pages

In order to ensure that a website visitor is directed to the information they are seeking, the creation of landing pages is important. These are usually single issue pages eg about a specific product or with a defined call to action. Directing visitors to these landing pages means that their search yields precisely the results they would expect, answering questions quickly and, when carefully designed, these can ensure that users follow the call to action without being distracted by too much information or too many navigational choices.

A landing page should be specifically optimised to tie into a set of keywords for your PPC and marketing campaigns, as this will help to deliver maximum results from your actions and budget.

Remember also the importance of a single call to action rather than a cluttered page which confuses the site visitor. Do you want them to buy, inquire, call you, fill out a feedback or contact form, take part in a poll, download a white paper, sign up to your mailing list? Whatever you need them to do, make sure there is only one call to action on each landing page. This will also help you to clearly track conversions and results.

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