Simplify Your Website and Boost Your Sales and Enquiries

Remember when the advice given to any business was to have a website? Just that one piece of advice: get a website. It doesn’t have to be special, or beautiful, it just needs to be functional.

Somehow over the years, this advice has changed. The advice became: add more calls to action. Get people to sign up to your newsletter by using a pop-up on the home screen (make sure you sign up to mine while you’re here - ha!).

Mobile access is vital — make sure every page is optimised and suitable for smartphone users.

The only piece of advice I agree with in the previous paragraph is to make sure your site is screen optimised. That’s just good sense. You want everyone to easily be able to access your site, whether they’re on a state of
the art Macbook or a clunky old tablet with a smashed-up screen.

Everything else is unimportant, really, although I do find my newsletter pop-up helps to boost my mailing list a bit. Here’s how to streamline your website to make it clearer and easier for your customers to use.

Only Use Calls to Action When Relevant

Don’t you hate it when you’re at the shop trying to pay for something and the cashier asks:

“This is actually on a three-for-two offer, do you want to grab another one?”

It’s great to get something for nothing, but when having to enact that offer is a hassle, it can often hardly seem worth it.

Here’s a similar scenario: If you’ve just nipped into the shop to buy a pen, and you’re being asked if you want a Kinder Egg and a bottle of Pepsi Max because ‘they’re on offer’, this calls into question the idea of relevance.

Do you like these items? Maybe. Would you buy them on a different day? Perhaps. But right now, when all you need is a pen, the extras don’t feel like a bonus. They feel like a pain in the bum.

Keep your call to actions relevant and use them sparingly so they retain their impact and you’ll see much better results than if you pepper them all over the place.

Use a Maximum of One Pop-Up

Pop-ups are the website equivalent of a sales assistant asking: “Can I help you?”

I’ve mentioned already that I have a pop-up on my website. It works well for me, because it’s not too intrusive and it’s offering something genuinely useful — the opportunity to sign up to my newsletter and pick up some handy hints and tips you can use in your business.

It appears once on the homepage once you reach my site, and once you’ve entered your email address (or clicked out of it), it goes away, never to return.

Keep using pop-ups throughout your site, or worse, set them up so they keep returning on every page, and you run the extreme risk of getting on everyone’s nerves. Your well- meaning pop-ups quickly turn from slightly useful to incredibly annoying.

That helpful shop assistant offering to show you what aisle you need to be on has started following you around the shop, asking you, every 30 seconds, if you need them to get anything for you.

You’d leave the shop, wouldn’t you? I’d run out of the door. People will do the same to your website.

These are my main two website content tips for 2020…

Stop hassling your customers. By now, everybody knows how websites work and what they need to do
in order to purchase items or find the information they need. If not, they’ll use your chat box, call you, email, leave a comment on your blog, or message you on any of your available social media profiles. They’ll reach you!

If you’d like a hand with looking over your website, get in touch with me and we can work together on a website audit to get everything back in perfect working order.

Until next time…

5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Website Today

Websites are vital to business, but we all know how time-consuming their upkeep can be.

That’s why I’ve come up with five things you can do today to improve your website. Not tomorrow at 9am; today. Even if it’s 3pm now. You can achieve these small tasks.

Consider this a collection of easy wins. Let’s get to it.

1. Check Your Contact Page

Can your customers reach you if they want to?

You’d be surprised.

Take a look through your contage page and see if all the information is correct and visible. Here’s a checklist for you:

●      Is the phone number right?

●      Can you highlight the phone number on mobile so someone can easily pick up the phone and call you?

●      Is the email address right?

●      Can the email address be clicked on or tapped to send a message immediately?

●      Does the contact form go anywhere?

●      Is your address and postcode visible?

●      If you have a map here, is it working?

Some of these might be issues for IT to deal with, but at least you know now that your customers can contact you without any trouble – or they will be able to soon.

2. Plan Some Blog Posts

You might not have time to write them today, but you can definitely come up with five blog post ideas for your website’s blog.

Blog posts are one of the best ways to improve and update your website’s content and bring new visitors to your website. Taking fifteen minutes to research some compelling blog post titles and then planning out some time to complete and upload them will improve your website by 100%.

Stuck? Try this blog post generator by Hubspot.

3. Update Your Imagery

You’re bound to have some images on your website that are out of date. Times change, things move on and inevitably, websites get a little tired.

Take a look at some of the stock imagery on your website’s main pages and think about photography you could replace it with instead.

Your customers and website visitors find original photography much more engaging than obvious stock photos, but don’t worry. If you have no photos and can’t organise a photoshoot (or take a few new ones yourself), stock imagery can work as long as:

●      It looks natural

●      It works in context

●      It matches the tone and feel of your website.

4. Check Your Links

Are your pages full of hyperlinks?

Well, they should be.

Google loves links that aid the reader to research more, and using links in context is a great way to boost your Google ranking.

However, broken links bring your site right back down again and not only that, they frustrate your visitors too.

Click through your links to make sure they aren’t leading to dead ends, and replace any that do.

5. Check Your Comments

Bots love to leave nonsense comments on blog posts. It’s just robot nature.

While there are very good, very useful spam detectors available for website developers to install, some comments just slip through the net and onto your website.

Take a few minutes to scan through your comment sections (doing this via the back end will be the easiest way) and nip off any of those weird, nonsensical comments that make your site feel a little overgrown and unloved.

I really hope these tips help motivate you to get improving your website. If you think you need a little more help, or would like to talk to me about the website content support I can offer you and your business, let’s chat.

Until next time…

Copywriting for Your Website: Some Dos and Don’ts

Your business’s website is like a shop window: there will be plenty of passers-by, but if the items on display are falling apart, or look to be poor in quality, no one will want to buy anything.

Of course, you’ll want to prevent that from happening in the first place – and this means producing stellar website content.

Read on for some dos and don’ts for creating copy that will turn visitors into loyal clients (fingers crossed!).

DO: Show What You Can Give or Take Away

Good copy tailors to the client’s needs. Sometimes, website visitors aren’t interested at all in your services, but most of the time, people click onto or around your website because they want to know how you can help them.

Show clients what you can give them. Do they need virtual assistance for their business? A new logo? A redesigned landing page? Tell them you can deliver - and turn their frown upside down!

On the flip side, show clients what you can take away from them. Do they want to get rid of the headache of updating their own blog? Of writing their own emails? Let them know you’re the man (or woman!) for the job.

DON’T: Rely Solely on Testimonials

In particular, DON’T include only testimonials that have customers showering you with praise. You certainly will receive testimonials that read along the lines of ‘I love this so much!!!’ but these kinds of testimonials will do little to sell your services to potential clients.

Yes, your business is amazing, but HOW? If you want to include testimonials on your website, use those that, as Joanna Wiebe puts it in this Copy Hackers article, “tell a story of what a customer’s challenge was before your product or service…and what the outcome of using your product or service was.”

DO: Make Yourself Clear

As a general rule of thumb, keep paragraphs short. That being said, there’s such a thing as being too short. Often this stems from the desire to avoid exceeding a word limit, or to create short and powerful phrases, which can lead you to whittle sentences down until they’re dry and boring. You’re then left with bland copy that could be recycled on hundreds of other websites.

Making yourself clear also includes double-checking your spelling and grammar. You could have the best-written landing page in the UK, but you could ruin all that with the wrong use of ‘their/there/they’re.’

DON’T: Talk About Yourself

Okay, obviously you SHOULD talk about yourself, but your website isn’t just for you to list every single thing you can do. You have to show what you have to offer to potential clients who may be scrolling through your site.

Shift from overusing ‘I’ and ‘we’ in favour of ‘you.’ This Quicksprout guide shows you how you can make your content more customer-focused (with some extra website copywriting tips as well).

DO: Hire a Copywriter

Hiring a website content writer seems an obvious option to improve your website, but many turn their noses at the idea. Many will deem it too expensive, while some will have a go at writing their own content.

Yes, you can certainly write your own website content, but can you be absolutely sure it will reflect your business in the way you want?

(And if you’re still not sure about hiring a website content writer, may I direct you to some of my success stories?)

Do you have any other tips for creating brilliant website content? Let me know in the comments below.

For updates, you can find me on Facebook and Twitter.

Copywrite vs CopyWRONG: Dos & Don’ts for Creating Winning Website Content

I'll start by saying the title for this article is probably a little misleading. After all, who's to say what's right or wrong when it comes to your business? Aside from sticking two fingers up at your customers when you spot them in the street (clue: VERY wrong), if something's worked for you in the past, you should stick with it.

But there are certainly a few things to keep in mind when writing website content - from my own experience, at least. So, let's have a look at some of them:

Copy'writes' (or rather, 'rights'!)

Think 'You', Not 'I' - When writing your website content, it can be so tempting to talk about yourself. After all, who knows you better than you?! But the key to getting prospective clients to sit up and take notice of you (and your services), is not to talk about 'you' at all. Instead, focus on what your client needs and how your services can help. By adopting this technique, you're still discussing how you can assist them, but you're putting them - and their unique issues and challenges - centre stage.

Bearing that tip in mind (and using a stationery company as a simple example), here's a look at how the following sentence might be reworded to benefit the customer:

This: "We're a trusted supplier of pens and paper here in the UK - and our prices are low."

Can be swapped for this: "Is your stationery cupboard consistently low in stock? Never run out of office essentials again; pens, paper and everything in between can be delivered to your workplace as soon as tomorrow - if required. You can put your trust in us since we're suppliers to X, Y, and Z - and you'll save money, too, since our prices are kept low enough to meet any budget."

The first thing you'll notice about the second snippet of content is that it's longer - why use one sentence when you can let the customer know how you'll make their life easier in three?! More benefits = more chance of you becoming their new go-to stationer.

Just Start Writing - Here's a tip the news editor of a weekly newspaper I used to write for once told me - and it stuck! Knowing full well that the headline of an article or feature is often the hardest thing about the piece to write (it needs to hook the reader from the off, you see), she'd tell me to instead write the rest of the content.

"The headline will come to you while you're typing." she once said - and do you know what? She was right! Nine times out of 10, that's exactly what happened. So why spend the best part of half an hour poring over puns? Just get something down; the rest will come in time.

The very same goes for your website copy. If you don't know where to begin, just begin! It sounds simple, doesn't it - but get everything down on paper, or on your computer to save you faffing around later making long-winded edits, and you'll have a clearer idea where to go from there. I promise.

Add Personality

So, you sell pens and paper - and unless you consistently ace those 'flog me this fountain pen' questions in job interviews, like many things, it won't seem like the most inspiring of subject matters.

But don't let that put you off - you've followed this career path for a reason, and it's because you're good at it!

So, without being all 'me, me, me', or rather, 'we, we, we', think about how you can 'jazz up' your copy in other ways. Offices need pens - and they'll always find a way to get them. But maybe when they're idly browsing the net for a new supplier, your company will stand out - and for another reason than the price.

Get your thinking caps on as a team and consider creative ways you can set yourself apart. Develop a company mascot to use on your site (hello, Peter Pen!*) and run with it. Trust me on this; it'll work.

*you can have that one for free

CopyWrongs

Keywords for Keywords' Sake - No, just N-O! I get it; you want people to find your site - and organically, too. But well-written website copy will mean so much more than a site that's located easily but doesn't quite hit the mark when your customer lands on it - and more importantly, starts reading it.

Instead, think key'worths', not keywords. Does each and every word count? If not, go back and make sure it does.

You can still optimise your site for SEO - and do it well - without over-stuffing it with keywords for the heck of it.

Poor Grammar and Spelling - You'd like prospective customers to trust in you and your services - so if your site's filled with 'text speak' (or your social media page is left in the hands of a disinterested intern), is it really giving off the right impression?

Poor spelling, grammar and an all-round blasé approach to copywriting is just.not.on. (and I use those unnecessary full stops with every last jot of irony).

I won't name and shame (because I'm nice, me) but I've heard business owners say things like: "Apostrophes? Who cares?! The customer knows what we mean" and it makes my pedantic, grammar-obsessed self's heart sink.

The fact is, customers probably will know what you mean - but will they take you seriously?

Just the other day I saw a sign for a company offering 'delivary' for 'breacfasts'. Will I be going there?! No. Because I don't care how well they fry an egg; they didn't think it appropriate to proofread the full-colour banner they probably spent a pretty penny on. So, how much care will they put into that 'breacfast'?! Beep, beep; I'm going to McDonald's drive 'thru' instead.

Too Much Copy - This one ties into point one on my copywrongs list - and really, there's only two reasons people waffle on their site: they don't know when to stop, or they're desperate to increase their organic reach by way of, you guessed it, a few more keywords. But we're a nation of skim readers (hooray if you've made it to the end of this blog - a full-size Curly Wurly bar to you, my friend) and who's got time for reams and reams of text? Not me. It's why I'm signing off this blog now. Ta-ra.

Like this article? Do let me know if it helped you in any way. And keep an eye here on my site for more of the same. If you think you can benefit from my copywriting services in 2018 and beyond, do get in touch and let's schedule a chat or a coffee in the diary.

Until next time...