Web Design, Development & Online Marketing - Serving the Central and North Texas Markets

Sequencing Copy for Maximum Conversion

Whether its online copywriting or offline, don’t “sell” on your pages.  Rather tell a story to get significantly better results.  This method is referenced from Marketing Experiments.  The case study showed 200%+ conversion improvement using this sequencing process…just by changing the copy. 

Tell a story.  People respond to stories.

Each part of the conversion process is tied to the ideal story progression.  It’s a process of transitions from set up to confrontation & rising action to climax then resolution.  The following will help to outline the structure for your own writing. 

1.  THE HEADLINE   - setup  

The “story” might start with your paid ad, for example, that sets up the promise leading them on the next step to your landing page.

Start with the “why” they may be on your page, what is driving them to look and confirm that in the title and text.

Action/goal:

a.  Attention grabbing headline that will resonate with the target audience

b.  Get them to click through or read on to the next paragraph

 2.  THE SUPPORTING PARAGRAPH/S - confrontation, rising action intensifies

 On your landing page, continue emphasizing the pain/problem you can solve with your very specific value as unique solution.  Several transitions can occur on the landing page.  Keep clarity to the viewer’s level of understanding.

First paragraph  (do NOT skip this):

a.  Where am I

b.  What can I do here

c.  Why should I do it

Body paragraph/s:  (Intensify with these elements now)

Proof  (data)

Benefits (before features)

Features  (only AFTER benefits)

Incentives  (offer)

Urgency   (today, save $200)

All of these can appeal to the external and internal motivators

Example: Boss wants you to gain/solve xyz (external) vs. advance your career by gaining experience leveraging the Internet for lead generation (internal)

3.   CALL TO ACTION  - resolution, climax

The Call to Action is the request for physical action or interaction by the reader.  It can encourage a phone call, a form completion, view a video, add-to-cart and so on. 

The Call-to-Action (CTA) must:

Be VISIBLE

Apply VALUE

Encourage IMMEDIACY

COME IN THE RIGHT TIME IN THOUGHT SEQUENCE

Call to action is presented such as  “Add to cart”, “complete the form”.  But use text in the action buttons that reassure that their action will deliver on the value promise.  Do not put “submit” or “click here”; instead use words to further the promise.  (Ex: “to receive info…”,  “Learn the xyz”, “Get the product to improve your life”, etc….)

Getting started

This is easy and it’s not easy.  As with most things, the hardest part is getting started.  With practice and ongoing experimentation with your web copy writing, the data (analytics) will prove the results of structuring your content for clarity and connection to what the viewer wants.  In doing so, in the right sequence, you will get what you want.

We are uniquely able to help you evaluate and take action on the breadth of factors influencing conversion:  Web design, website development, Internet marketing, driving traffic, conversion tactics, applying business intelligence through data.

We are here to help you achieve great things online.  As for copywriting services:

1.  We can write for you or help guide you (or your designated writers) to ensure you have the greatest opportunity for conversion success with your text & graphics.

2.  We can technically SEO (search engine optimization) your copy so it will gain better visibility on Google and other search engines.

3.  We can strategize a plan for content topics and delivery channels for strong “inbound” marketing.

Contact us today and together we’ll evaluate your most important website pages.

If you haven't had a chance yet to learn about WSI's amazing Online Business console, WSI EFusion, I suggest you take a look at a quick demo here.

WSI EFusion is an amazing platform to enhance any online business and help you keep track of your leads, manage your own website, create custom modules, and much much more to help increase your internet marketing strategy.

July 2011 Enhancements

Modules within Modules

WSI EFusion has many different modules built-in including Blogs, Photo Galleries, Webforms, Custom Web App modules, and many others. Now we are bringing the ability to include a module within a different module. IE. the ability to include a photo gallery within a blog post, or insert ANY module into a Web App. This will allow for extreme customization of the tools built into WSI EFusion. We have also include a Module Manager into the WYZYWYG for easy access to add in modules.

Device Specific Templates

We continue to help enhance the ability to provide the best access to your website no matter what device your site is being viewed on whether it's a desktop/laptop, smart phone, or a tablet. WSI EFusion now includes a two extra versions of every sitewide template, one for smart phones and one for tablets. When EFusion detects what device you are on, you have the ability to have a mobile version of your site and tablet version of your site to direct them too. This will greatly enhance the user experience of your website.

SEO Friendly URLs for Web Apps

One of the most powerful tools of WSI EFusion is the ability to create your own custom web app. Web Apps are extremely powerful and let you create custom modules for your website with no additional programming charges. We are now excited to say that WSI EFusion has the ability to have a custom SEO friendly URL. For instance: http://www.yoursite.com/webapp-name/webapp-item-name This will let you have complete control of the URL. Let's say you use a Web App for a real estate website for homes located in Dallas Texas. Your Web App for each home can now be http://www.yoursite.com/Dallas-Texas/Homes-In-Plano and this can be modified however you see fit!

July 2011 release

The new update will be taking place on July 6th, 2011 at 11:00AM CST. The deployment time will take a few hours, but there will be no major disruptions to service during this time.

We'll keep you posted!

Just like everything else these days online marketing is going mobile. As smart phones become cheaper and more popular, people are finding themselves using their phones and tablets more and more to do their internet searching. Especially when searching for things locally. How many times have you needed to find a restaurant and pulled your phone out to search for directions?

Mobile Phone Usage is Exploding

According to CISCO mobile phone usage is going to DOUBLE by 2012 and TRIPLE by 2013. Sounds like a mobile marketing strategy needs to be developed now.

Have you ever Googled something on your phone and seen different search results then Googling on a PC? That's because Google knows your on a mobile device and wants to deliver the best results for you on the go. Thus they emphasize and rank higher those sites that are mobile friendly and have higher 'mobile ranking' because of Google Places, Local Reviews, etc.

A websites mobile traffic is averaging around 10%, but from personal experience I have seen mobile traffic double during holidays and high traffic times because people are using their phones while on the go as they travel. That's 20% of your traffic, or 1 out of every 5 people vising your site. You might think "Well but 4 out of 5 people still visit us on a computer, so do we really need a mobile strategy?" Remember it's 20%. If you grew your annual revenue by 20% would that be a pretty big deal? I think we all can say yes.

Creating a Mobile Marketing Strategy

Even before we get to the mobile marketing aspects of things, you first need to make sure your website is 'Mobile Friendly'. What we typically see is a 'watered down' version of a website when visiting a mobile website because people want to quickly aspect the most important things to them. This typically leans toward your contact information, directions, phone number, email address etc. People want these things fast, so when thinking about your mobile website keep in mind people will be accessing your site from a phone or tablet for fast information.

So don't use large images, videos, flash etc. Straight forward HTML and CSS can easily get people to what they are looking for on your site.

Start by creating a sitemap of your mobile site, just like you would your regular website. Except ask yourself what would I want to access on my website in 2 minutes or less if I were coming here for quick information?

Now this doesn't mean to exclude critical aspects of your website, but keep in mind your traffic is coming from a smaller screen and wanting the information more quickly.

Optimizing Your Mobile Website

Your mobile website can be optimized like any other site by using good practices of keyword friendly Meta Tags, Title Tags, and SEO friendly URLs. But more importantly to be found on a mobile search is how many LOCAL sites you are listed in. Remember, Google is ranking you based on it being a local search 99% of the time. The more prominent you are on local review sites will be a great improvement towards your mobile SEO rankings. A good place to start would be Google Places, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Super Pages, Four Square, etc.

Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

If you are unsure how to start your mobile marketing plan, feel free to contact us today for a free consultation review of your internet marketing strategy. You can also read our White Paper regarding mobile phone metrics here.

One of the most common mistakes we come across in regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is that most sites contain only one sitemap. Your sitemap is used for search engines to identify pages across your site, which greatly enhances crawl rates and indexing of your website. The more pages you have indexed, the more likely your content is to be found in search engines. Thus why not use multiple site maps to separate out content on your site?

The Why

Now lots of people say "Oh well my site isn't large enough for multiple sitemaps." But doesn't your site have a blog? Might your blog need a separate sitemap? Or sitemap for a section of articles or resources?

One of the biggest reasons for separating these out, is so that you now exactly how many pages in each section of your site are indexed. It would of course be a lot easier if big'ol mean Google would just tell you within Webmaster Tools. But hey they're not. So it makes sense to break your site down into multiple sitemaps so you can easily see what on your website is indexing and what is not.

You can see above that by separating out the sitemaps that we know 98% of our blogs have been indexed by Google. If these weren't separated how we would know? How do you know if your blog is indexed?

The How

Creating Sitemaps is pretty easy, I recommend the XML sitemap generator over at www.xml-sitemaps.com. For simple sites I recommend at least separating out your blog separately from your main site. If you have a separate section for articles, I would do one for it as well.

For larger more complex sites, for instance an e-commerce site with hundreds of product pages, you might have a sitemap for each primary category and possibly subcategories. That's for you to decide.

The Results

With this practice, not only is it easier to analyze your websites indexing, but your website will more than likely have more indexed pages and index new pages faster.

The same holds true with Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Toolbox. Each allows for submission of multiple sitemaps of your website. Note that Bing Toolbox is at least nice enough to actually show you the indexed pages in the Index > Index Explorer section, but don't expect them to automatically start indexing a separate Blog Sitemap. I recommend that you monitor this section and physically look to see what is being indexed. You can manually submit your URLs since they allow for 50 direct URL submissions a month or 10 per day.

Which caption do you like for this search engine optimization cartoon? Tell us which one you like best or comment with your own creative option. (G- or PG-rated only, please).

Caption Options

We welcome all silly or serious comments and suggestions. SEO is serious business but that doesn’t mean we all can’t lighten up now and then. The winning caption will be used on our printed postcard…maybe!

Add your caption as a comment to this post!