This is the first in a series of posts on improving a website’s conversion rate. Over the coming weeks I’ll be explaining how you can identify the reasons why your website isn’t converting and then how you can make measurable improvements.

I’ll be covering a range of tools and tactics for making your website more persuasive, ‘sticky’ and profitable. So stay subscribed folks!

It’s a fact – most websites don’t perform anywhere near their potential. Too often, they’ve been built based on assumptions and guesswork. Businesses will then spend a fortune on driving traffic, but without a clue whether their website will generate any sales.

But there’s a better way.

The internet is a marketing medium that’s trackable to the last click. Instead of best guesses and hope, you can test exactly what works and what doesn’t.

Using real info on what people are doing, you can mould and improve your website’s conversion so it’s better at persuading visitors that buying your product is the smart thing to do.  Instead of relying on preconceptions, you can see what actually works.

There are businesses that have literally doubled their revenue from implementing a tested approach to improving the conversion rate of their website. It’s for a simple reason: it works.

It doesn’t require magic buttons, HTML tricks or the ability to write like David Ogilvy. What it does require is:

1)      Understanding your customers’ objections

2)      Identifying how you can resolve these objections and build trust

3)      Implementing changes and testing the results

4)      Rinse and repeat, until you arrive at a higher converting website

Businesses spend thousands on PPC and SEO but without fine tuning their website. But this is the wrong way round. It’s like spending a fortune on a highway to a shopping centre without knowing whether visitors will buy anything.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be showing you a system for flipping this equation the right way round. I will show you how to make real improvements to your website you can measure to the last click.

Literally any website can benefit from a tested approach to improving website conversion. Stay tuned to find out why.

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We now have the tools to test what effect every element on a web page has on response rates. But as yet, these tools are criminally underused.

Is it due to laziness? A desire to just get copy signed off and the job done? Or lack of awareness? Probably a combination of all three.

So next year I aim, in my own small way, to change that, with a new tested copywriting service.

Out go best guesses, assumptions and hope. In come stats, analysis and higher conversions.

My newfound enthusiasm for testing has been inspired by the fantastic book ‘Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion’ by Ben Hunt (yes, it’s an affiliate link. But as you know, I’d never promote to you, dear Crucible fans, anything I don’t use myself).

Drayton Bird’s endorsement was enough to get me interested, and as I started ploughing through its pages it was like switching on a light bulb. Ben explains, step by step, how to identify customers at different stages of conversion (or steps on the awareness ladder, as he calls it) and how your website needs to be organised to drive them through a trust building process until they’re ready to take action. Hitting them with sales messages from the get go isn’t going to cut it.

In particular, he explains how to use Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer to track, analyse and verify your website is performing as an optimised sales machine. This is where assumptions and best guesses translate into clear, transparent figures.

I’d like to say it’s a page turner but you’ll find yourself constantly putting it down to action one of his suggestions to your own website. Eventually I gave up and read it at my keyboard.

So why not treat yourself to another Christmas present and discover how you can implement a smarter, tested approach to your website’s copywriting and design, and watch your response rate grow:

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There are few professions that can compete with the air of mystery that surrounds SEO. In fact, David Copperfield could learn a thing or two about misdirection and creating mystique from a chat with an SEO consultant.

But things are changing.

Google’s algorithm is getting ever more sophisticated, and the attempts to game it ever more antiquated. Pretty soon, it will be what other people say about your website that decides its ranking, rather than the tactics you can deploy yourself.

But for now, here’s a basic rundown of how SEO works:

On page optimisation

Title tag <title> – Placed in the header section, this helps Google identify your page’s subject, and defines the description that appears at the top of the browser window

URL – Having keywords in your domain name and page name also helps

Heading tag <H1> – Tells Google what the title of your page or article is

Body content – Keyword stuffing is more likely to get you blacklisted then patted on the head. But it’s wise to aim for a keyword density of 2-4% to keep the SE spiders well fed.

Popping your website address into SEOBugz.com will tell you whether you’ve ticked off all of the above.

Off page optimisation

It’s all about the backlinks baby. So how do you get them? Here are some common tactics:

1. Blanket email/spam website owners offering a link exchange.
2. Beg relevant websites with a high Page Rank for a backlink
3. Manually create mini websites for posting backlinks
4. Post articles to directories with linked keywords and phrases
5. Post links in social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit)
6. Post relevant comments in blogs

These tactics are all well and good. But they can be very time consuming and there’s no guarantee Google won’t flick a switch (e.g. Panda) and reduce their impact.

There are 100s of other SEO tricks you can try, but they could all stop working tomorrow.

Instead, there’s a better approach to SEO that combines marketing, PR and sales into one juicy cocktail. What am I talking about? Yep, you guessed it – customer focused SEO copywriting.

SEO copywriting should focus on answering your customers’ questions

The aim of a forward thinking SEO campaign should be to attract links naturally.

To do this, you need to create content that people want to link to. So rather than produce keyword stuffed articles that scrape, copy and mash together content already available, SEO copywriting should focus on being valuable, interesting and original.

For topic ideas, consider what questions your customers might ask before buying your product or what queries they’re typing into Google. Answering these questions through your content will:

1. Attract ‘long tail’ traffic from search queries
2. Build trust in your expertise
3. Pull customers into your sales funnel if they subscribe to your blog
4. Attract links from people sharing your articles with friends and colleagues in social media
5. Attract links from other bloggers in your field (posting helpful comments on their blogs is a good way of attracting their attention)

To get these benefits, your articles will need to deploy the persuasive and psychological techniques used by generations of copywriters. These are skills not easily found in article writing sweatshops, which continue to pour their bilge onto the web.

As word spreads on the new long term approach to SEO, expect to see more businesses investing in high quality SEO copywriting in 2012 – which provides useful information with a sales pitch weaved between the words.

It’s one SEO tactic that’s destined to always generate results.

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Ah, the long form sales letter. Such a bone of contention among copywriters. Many will deride their length, saying nobody has the patience to read pages of copy these days, whilst direct marketing copywriters, who test avidly, will tell you otherwise.

When discussing long form copy, many people will picture those get rich quick schemes covered in bold red headlines, where you can earn millions with only ten minutes work a day while drinking pina colada’s on your beachfront balcony.

With this sort of reputation, you’d think a long form sales letter has no place being on a serious corporate website.

After all, business folks are busy people. They’ve got a mountain of emails to plough through, meetings to attend and conference calls they’re already late for. They don’t have time to wade through pages of copy, or will be fooled by your copywriting mind tricks.

But is this correct?

Perhaps it’s time to take a scientific approach. To stop basing the length of B2B copy on intuition and to find out what actually pulls in the numbers.

Long form copywriting gives you space to answer objections

Long form sales pages have the potential to dramatically improve conversion rates on B2B websites.

This was the argument put forward in a recent Internet Marketing Podcast interview with Dr Karl Blanks, the co-founder of Conversion Rate Experts. With a client list that includes Google, Apple and Sony, when he speaks you tend to listen.

One example he gave was how the changes they made to the landing page for SEOMoz increased revenue $1 million/year. Their approach included all the classic traits of a long form sales letter. These tactics would be equally effective on a B2B landing page.

After all, whether you’re selling sparkplugs or software, your website still needs to convey the same information as you would selling face to face. And you wouldn’t tell your sales people to stop talking after three minutes, now, would you?

Write for the customer, not for yourself

Too often, corporate home pages focus on trying to make the company sound important and impressive. They’ll use longwinded clichéd gobbledegook rather than tell the customer what they actually want to know.

A landing page should be focused on the customer. It should answer all their questions, counter their objections, remove risk and give proof that you can deliver what you promise. This is a lot to cram into 300 words.

Ultimately, landing pages should be as long as they need to be to win a sale or to trigger an enquiry. Maybe long copy isn’t always the answer.

But (as the SEOMoz case study shows) it’s certainly worth considering and testing.

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Upon visiting my website I discovered nasty looking warning signs plastered all over the home page and in my WordPress’ admin screen. Thinking it was probably a plugin playing up, I logged into my WordPress theme’s support forum to get some answers.

Unfortunately, the issue wasn’t so innocent or simple to solve.

In super quick time, I got a response from my theme’s creator, Andon, with the words every website owner dreads – ‘Matt, I think your website has been hacked’. Not exactly the best news to receive last thing on a Friday.

Thankfully, Andon also gave me some salient advice on something every WordPress owner needs to know, and how to protect against it: In  July and early August there was a security vulnerability discovered with TimThumb script used in some WordPress themes and plugins.

So if you haven’t updated your theme in a while, you could be at risk, and should follow these steps to lockdown your WordPress website:

• Take a deep breath and try not to panic. Rushing through these steps could create an even bigger mess if you get them wrong
• Backup all your WordPress files and database (you can download your database with this plugin)
• Update your WordPress installation and theme to the latest versions. If you have a premium theme they should have put out a security update. If it’s a theme you’ve created yourself, it might be worth getting it checked over by a WordPress expert (feel free to post your details in the comments, if you are one)
• Check to see whether any new users you don’t recognise have been added (as I discovered to my horror) and delete them post-haste
• Change your passwords if you haven’t done so in a while
• Even after changing your passwords hackers can still login if you haven’t cleared their cookies. You can do this by uploading WordPress security keys to your wp-config.php file
• Install WordPress Firewall 2 and AntiVirus plugins for an extra line of defence

Thankfully, the hackers didn’t do much damage (as far as I can tell), and I was still able to login and rescue it from their clutches.

There’s still some ugly warning messages all over my admin panel and for some reason three portfolio posts were sent to subscribers yesterday(?). But other than that, I think I got away lightly.

Otherwise I might not be writing to you now.

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Getting people to trust you has always been a cornerstone of effective copywriting. It’s a simple principle: if people believe what you say, they’re more likely to buy.

A key factor in building trust, that’s often ignored, is the channel you use. An advertorial, for example, in a well respected broadsheet is likely to have a higher response rate than if you were to email the same advert.

A YouGov survey (reported upon in Marketing Week) to assess levels of trust in different types of media (in response to the phone hacking scandal) found the following:

• radio  - 52% think it’s very or fairly trustworthy
• TV – 47%
• newspapers – 28%
• magazines from brands – 25%
• online magazines and mag apps – 23%
• paid-for printed magazines – 22%
• websites – 21%
• email – 11%
• direct marketing – 8%
• celebrity tweets – 1%
• YouTube and website videos – less than 1%

(Breakdown courtesy of Help in the City blog)

Combining channels can increase trust levels (and sales)

Another interesting stat is that the same percentage (31%) trust ‘comments/reviews written by other users and customers’ as editorial written by professional journalists. This highlights the power of ‘word of mouth’ in the social media age, and that people are actively looking for feedback from other customers before committing to a purchase.

With this in mind, it’s worth considering how you can incorporate customer feedback alongside your own content for maximum trust building impact. Perhaps by extending your promotions into Facebook and Twitter, therein lies the answer?

Another takeaway is the fact that people now trust free branded magazines (e.g. those of supermarkets) more than paid-for magazines. After endlessly banging my drum about content marketing a few years back, it looks as though people are finally getting used to the idea of brands being producers of quality content, and not merely shallow advertising.

Customers are a cynical bunch

So what else can you apply from these findings to your marketing?

Well firstly, the overall low levels of trust show that you can’t afford to treat your customers like idiots. People are already cynical of marketing. Filling your copywriting with exaggerated claims and hype won’t win you many friends.

Secondly, try to involve customer input, with reviews, case studies and comments, to build the authenticity they’re looking for in this (supposed) era of transparency.

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Do you own a smartphone? I bet, being the sophisticated reader that you are, you do. You only need to do a quick scan of people on trains, in supermarket queues and around the office to know that smartphones are absorbing more and more of people’s attention. And there are plenty of stats to prove it.

Recent figures (compiled by Google and the British Retail Consortium) show that mobile search is growing over 200% year-on-year. 27% of the UK population now owns a smartphone (and shockingly, for cash strapped parents, 57% of teenagers).

So should we start worrying about the implications for us copywriters of the shift to a shrunken version of the internet? Maybe. But for now, what’s important is to be offering valuable advice to our clients, many of whom will be wondering how they can convert their website for the mobile web.

If you’d like to know how your website looks on people’s smartphones, you can do a quick check by entering a website’s address into skweezer.com. If it looks as though it’s been squeezed through a letterbox, you’re not alone.

Thankfully, creating a mobile version of your website doesn’t have to be the technical minefield it sounds:

1) Create an app style version

With services like mobisiteGalore or Zinadoo, you can create a stripped down version of your website without any coding wizardry or having to worry about different screen sizes and formats.

The drawback is that the customization options are fairly limited, along with the type of websites you can create. But it can be a quick, easy way of enabling people to get core information about your company on their mobiles.

2) Create a stripped down version

Mobify is a service used by The New Yorker, Threadless and Wired to create mobile versions of their websites. To use it, you simply select which elements you wish to port over and Mobify will do the rest.

I haven’t tried it myself, and it appears to be aimed more at ecommerce and publishing sites, but it’s certainly worth a look if you don’t want to get tangled up in code.

3) Plan for the future, with ‘responsive web design’

If you’d prefer to keep all your website’s elements intact, you could modify your website with ‘responsive design’. This involves setting the sizes of all your elements as a proportion of the screen size (this post covers it in more depth).

With tablet PCs also growing in popularity, responsive design enables you to create a website that will expand or reduce to make the best use of the available space, and to ensure people can enjoy a smooth experience whatever device they’re using.

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Sooo, the new website is up and running, after a few minor technical hitches.

On the home page you’ll see I’ve followed through with the idea/threat of switching to promoting myself as an agency. Along with the elevated sense of self importance, I’m hoping it will push me up higher into the big leagues as a serious outfit, one that’s ready to take on all the business world’s copywriting projects, both big and small.

But with transparency and being honest with clients high on the agenda, I’ve made it clear that it’s still me behind the curtain pulling the levers. Otherwise, I’ll be on thin ice when clients start wondering why it’s only me that ever picks up the phone.

My USP – Cliché free B2B copywriting

Google’s search results are a crowded place.

So to try and stand out I thought I’d give myself the USP of offering corporate BS free copywriting. You won’t find any ‘bleeding edges’ or ‘best of breeds’ being poured out from this melting pot.

But I’m starting to have second thoughts.

Am I at risk of scaring off the entire B2B crowd with my high mindedness? Are endless superlatives and grandiose claims how they expect copywriting to sound?

If so, will they pay my invoice?

So to help me decide, I thought I’d put clichéd copywriting on trial.

First up, the defence for the ‘blue sky thinking’ style of copywriting that’s sat (looking rather smug in a pinstriped suit, might I add) in the dock…

The Defence – Clichés build rapport and familiarity

Buzzwords might make us copywriters wince. But customers are different. They don’t spend all day reading through marketing material like we do.

Words and phrases that sound like clichés to us are common expressions that help people get your point. They immediately know what you mean.

After all, isn’t it our job to communicate as clearly and concisely as possible? Creative wordplay should be left for novelists. Otherwise, for the sake of sounding unique and clever, you risk writing long winded phrases that are inaccessible to readers.

And terms like ‘synergy’ and ‘one stop shop’ sound professional. It’s the way business people talk. If you’re a serious company with a serious product, you don’t want to sound like someone flogging watches in a bar or how you’d chat to a neighbour over the fence.

Keep your ‘conversational’ copy for those that want to hear it – teenagers and bloggers.

Well, after that ballsy defence, clichéd copywriting is looking more pleased with itself than ever, even giving the court typist a sly wink.

Will the prosecution be able to knock it off its perch? Let’s find out…

The Prosecution – Clichés are lazy, meaningless and send customers to sleep

When you read copywriting packed with clichés it can sound as though the copywriter has been writing on autopilot – hammering out one hackneyed superlative after another, with one eye on Game of Thrones.

Clichés are so overused that they’ve become vacuous phrases without any real meaning.

Everybody is so far outside the box we don’t even know what the box is anymore. And can anybody remember a world where everything wasn’t already ‘turnkey’ and ‘off the shelf’? Supposedly, we all had to assemble everything ourselves, like an Airfix model without any glue.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of words to choose from for expressing an idea or concept.

And customers don’t want to listen to a business droning on about how it’s the fastest/cheapest/market leading/ etc. They want real information they can use.

Focus on what the customer wants

Copywrting should be focused on them – on their problems, hopes and desires. It should show empathy for their predicament, and explain how your product can solve it in real tangible benefits. Not with sugar coated features.

And beneath the power suit and reassuringly thick business cards, a B2B customer is still a living, breathing human being. You’re not writing to a fax machine.

Writing that’s more conversational, and mirrors how people talk, comes across as more trustworthy. And as any salesman will tell you, trust is invaluable when trying to sell something.

So rather than use lazy, meaningless clichés, copywriting should be fresh, tight and brimming with personality. It should arouse a customer’s curiosity, keep them reading until the last full stop and then send them rushing to place an order.

Copywriting won’t achieve this if it’s reeling off the same old tired sales patter customers have read a million times before.

The verdict – Guilty!

And with that, as the writer and self appointed judge, I’ve decided that clichéd copywriting needs to be locked away – permanently.

 Guards!

Not looking so smug now, are you?

But I fear clichéd copywriting will only serve a minimal sentence. I’ll be forced to release it soon. It’s far too entrenched in the B2B world’s vernacular to be removed from polluting the marketing world forever.

After all, I’ve got bills to pay and clients to keep happy. But at least I’ve made a small stand for fresh, cliché free copywriters everywhere.

Now, time to rewrite my home page…

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Dear Readers,

Sorry for the flood of promotional sounding posts in your inboxes and RSS feeds this weekend. As I hope you’ve guessed, these weren’t supposed to have been sent out (I’d never use my blog for such blatant self promotion).

I’m currently updating my website with a new theme, which unfortunately seems to have placed all the portfolio pages in my blog feed. So please just delete everything you’ve received in the last two days, and sorry again for the intrusion.

Matt

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Why do people buy things? Sounds a simple question. In the copywriting world, you’re taught to use a combination of aspiration, emotion and logic to secure a purchase. But there can also be subconscious irrational reasons at play.

Over the last decade ‘behavioural economics’ has grown in popularity as a way of identifying the irrational reasons behind buying decisions. These are reasons that fly in the face of commonsense or logic, and aren’t recognised in classic economic theory.

After identifying what these irrational triggers are, behavioural economics aims to use them as a way of influencing how people behave and ‘nudge’ them towards taking action.

A popular book on the concept, ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness’, is believed to be required reading in UK government circles, and Obama is believed to use its principles to guide his reforms.

So maybe there’s something in it for us copywriters…

4 key principles of behavioural economics you can weave into your copywriting

1. Price context/framing

People will gauge the value of something based on the other options available.

Restaurants will stock an exceptionally expensive bottle of wine because it increases the sales of the next bottle down by making it will feel as though you’re splashing out without going overboard. Similarly, the second cheapest can be a top seller because it feels like you’re saving money without being like a cheapskate.

Another great example of price framing is the supermarket chain M&S’s ‘Dine in for 2 for £10’. This positions the range as an alternative to eating out in a restaurant, thus subconsciously raising its value.

2. Fewer choices makes it easier to buy

In an experiment, one shop sold 24 types of jam whilst another sold 6. The shop selling 6 jams outsold the other shop by 5 times. Why? Because if you give people too many options it makes it harder for them to make a decision. It simply increases the variables in play and the potential objections to each choice.

3. Power of the default option

When you give people an automatic default option it gives them a sense of ownership. It feels like something they already have. The sense of loss people feel from giving up that option is stronger than the sense of gain. So if there’s a particular option you want to direct people towards buying, set it as a default.

4. Make the cost less painful with delayed payment

This is a trick retailers of high price products, like sofas and high end TVs, have used for decades. Offering delayed payment reduces the pain people feel at the point of purchase. They don’t feel the sense of loss of money being sucked from their bank account at that moment. Delaying payment softens the sting and makes it easier for people to say ‘yes’.

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