For companies operating in an e-commerce environment, or for those businesses that rely heavily on revenue generated by their website, it can be easy to make the mistake of focusing the design of your website purely on a tight conversion funnel that takes the customer from arrival to purchase in as few steps as possible.
Without compelling content though, your website may lack the sales pitch element required to properly convince visors to become customers. Visitors to your website may be at any stage of the buying process. They may want to know if they can trust you, if you have a product range that suits them, or if your business can cater for their needs in general.
Here are some factors to consider when compiling content for your pages, as it specifically applies to conversions.
Consistency
You may have multiple people working on content on your site but it’s important that the website has one clear consistent voice. It’s also important that this voice isn’t the same as everyone else’s.
To potential customers, a website is essentially a single business entity, a personality. They will find that personality more credible and trustworthy if it’s present on every page.
Persuasive Language
When you put together ad copy, you aim for it to be interesting and compelling, so it motivates the audience to seek you out and do business with you.
This same principle should apply to the content of your website. Using words and terms that are classically persuasive and known to incite emotional responses in people will keep visitors engaged and make sure they don’t tumble out of the conversion funnel.
This can be a fine line to walk, because overdoing it can make you look too focused on selling them. Strike a balance between persuading and informing for best results.
Grammar
Nothing ruins your site’s credibility faster than publishing content that is riddled with spelling errors and poor grammar. If your business can’t put together content intelligently on your site, why would visitors expect your company’s solutions to be intelligent, practical or responsible?
Readability
Your content should consider every different type of visitor. Some like to read in-depth about a topic, while others just like to skim over the text and get an idea of the subject matter.
Cutting down on the amount of words you use, putting titles every few paragraphs and putting some information into bullet points, will let readers understand important product facts more easily and make sure they don’t lose interest while reading the content.
User Aimed Content
The content on your website shouldn’t be used to boast about your company’s incredible business acumen or to intellectually explore the subject matter of your website.
You need to consider your various target markets, and put together content that effectively communicates with them. Focus the content for your product or service on the needs of the customer. Don’t just talk about rich product detail, or tell them that you’re an amazing company, but explain how you can benefit them. Interact with customers on an emotional level, rather than a logical one, but don’t neglect the logic or your proposition either.
Spam
SEO and interesting content are constantly at odds. While you do want to put together content that will get favourably noticed by search engines, never let that pursuit compromise the readability of your content.
Stuffing keywords or placing them in inappropriate places will seem unnatural to human visitors and will harm the perceived quality of your site. Also as search engine algorithms become more intuitive, you risk being penalised for spammy low-quality content.
Call to Action
Each page should have some prompt which attempts to get the visitors further down the conversion funnel. Don’t let this seem pushy, but rather offer a constant opportunity for users to get closer to their product need.
Use a call to action which is convincing, and even exciting, rather than just the boilerplate ‘click here’ whenever appropriate.
This aim of this article isn’t to try say that SEO is a poor idea for content and that you should solely focus your efforts on the sales pitch of website, but rather that you shouldn’t lose perspective when trying to optimise. You have to remember that getting ranked high on the SERP is only the first step in getting people in the door, the rest is up to your website and value proposition.