Optimal Copy - SEO Copywriting Blog

By Karon Thackston

Sometimes choosing which company to buy from is about like
deciding which brand of canned peas is the best. To make matters
worse, the copy on most websites doesn’t offer any help.

There are three major offenders in copywriting that I see
constantly on the Internet. The first is generic copy that offers
no specific differentiation points — in other words, reasons why
the visitor should choose you instead of the thousands of other
sites that are just a click away. The second is overused fluff
copy that has no substance. And the third? Using company-focused
copy (”we” and “us”) instead of customer-focused (”you” and
“your”). It’s the third offender I want to address in this
article.

I am literally shocked that — after decades of marketing
evangelists preaching “It’s not about you!” — website owners
still don’t get it. What’s not to understand? Copy that focuses
strictly on your company and practically or completely ignores
your prospects doesn’t work nearly as well as copy that speaks to
your target customers in their language and about the benefits
they will receive.

I discussed this very topic with SEO friend Jill Whalen
recently, and she commented, “I think people don’t understand how
to write to the customer instead of about their company.” Perhaps
my cohort is right. So, in an effort to educate, let’s look at
several before and after scenarios.

Company-Focused Copy Examples

It’s as if this web design firm has intentionally made an effort
to ignore their site visitors. They use their company name, “the
client,” “customers,” and practically every other word to
describe who is reading the page. Except, that is, the most
important: you. You must address the one, single person who is
reading your web page at any given moment, not a collective
population of people.

ABC Web Design is dedicated to customer service. We make great
strides to offer high levels of customer service and
communication with clients. As a small company, we understand
one-on-one service is needed. Our designers have developed
hundreds of small-business websites and we make the process
simple. Contact us for pricing and a free consultation today.

Do you see that not a single “you” is used? The site visitor is
never addressed. It’s all about the company. Now let’s change it
to be about the customer:

ABC Web Design is dedicated to your success, promising high
levels of customer service and communication. You’ll be kept up
to date — on a one-to-one basis — about the progress of your
project. Relying on years of experience, your web designer makes
the creation process simple, guiding you through every step.
Contact us for pricing and a free consultation today.

Here’s another example.

We have the finest contractors in the marketplace today. Our
kitchen experts have been recruited from the most successful
companies. XYZ Kitchen Remodeling Company of Kalamazoo has the
support of a large network with over 300 reliable and
professional kitchen remodeling contractors serving most of North
America.

Here’s the rewrite:

When you want to work with the finest contractors in the
marketplace, XYZ Kitchen Remodeling Company of Kalamazoo answers
the call. Not only will you benefit from using experienced
kitchen experts, your renovation is backed by the support of the
largest network of kitchen remodelers. That gives you the
knowledge and skills of over 300 reliable, professional kitchen
remodeling contractors in North America.

See the difference? Is it a sin to use the words “us” or “our”?
Certainly not, but your copy should be weighted far more heavily
with customer-oriented words than company-focused ones. Tell
visitors about your service, your results and your experience.
But do so in a way that makes them and their success the center
of the copy.

When you keep the focus on your company, you prevent your target
customer from knowing the benefits they’ll reap after working
with you. However, when you adjust your focus, you shine a bright
light helping visitors to quickly see why you’re the best choice
for them.

Karon Thackston creates customer-focused copy that connects and
converts. If you’re struggling with copy that doesn’t perform,
contact Karon today through http://www.MarketingWords.com for
online copywriting or copywriting training.

By Jill Whalen

Last night was our third SEMNE event (Search Engine Marketing New England: http://www.semne.org), and we were humbled to have Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, spilling the beans about how to get your site into Google. He talked for a half hour or so, and then proceeded to answer audience questions for at least another hour. As I sat there listening to him (yes, I actually listened to this one!), I was struck by what an awesome important information — straight from Google. It was clear that the 100 or so people in the room agreed. In fact, at 7:30 on the dot, everyone spontaneously stopped their networking activities and simply took their seats without being asked to. These folks definitely came to hear Google!

What Is Indexing?

Dan started out his presentation discussing what “indexing” means and how Google goes about it. Basically, the process for the Google crawler is to first look at the robots.txt file in order to learn where it shouldn’t go, and then it gets down to business visiting the pages it is allowed to visit. As the crawler lands on a page, it finds the relevant information contained on it, then follows each link and repeats the process.

Robots.txt Explored

Dan proceeded to explain how to use your robots.txt file for excluding pages and directories from your site that you might not want indexed, such as the cgi-bin folder. He told us how each of the major search engines have their own commands for this file but that they’re working to standardize things a bit more in the future.

In terms of what the crawler looks at on the page, he said there are over 200 factors, with “relevance” playing a big part in many of them.

Google Still Loves Its PageRank

Dan also discussed the importance of PageRank (the real one that only Google knows about, not the “for-amusement-purposes-only” toolbar PR that many obsess over). He let us know that having high-quality links is still one of the greatest factors towards being indexed and ranked, and then he proceeded to explain how building your site with unique content for your users is one of the best approaches to take. (Now, where have you heard that before? He explained how creating a community of like-minded individuals that builds up its popularity over time is a perfect way to enhance your site.

Did You Know About These Tags?

We were also treated to some additional tips that many people may not have known about. For instance, did you know that you could stop Google from showing any snippet of your page in the search engine results by using a “nosnippet” tag? And you can also stop Google from showing a cached version of your page via the “noarchive” tag. Dan doesn’t recommend these for most pages since snippets are extremely helpful to visitors, as is showing the cache. However, Google understands that there are certain circumstances where you may want to turn those off.

Breaking News!

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you! Pretty neat stuff!

Webmaster Central Tools

Dan couldn’t say enough good things about their Webmaster Central tools. I have to say that seems to be very common with all the Google reps I’ve heard speak at various conferences. The great thing is that they’re not kidding! If you haven’t tried the webmaster tools yet, you really should because they provide you with a ton of information about your site such as backward links, the keyword phrases with which people have found each page of your site, and much, much more!

Sitemaps Explored

One of the main tools in Webmaster Central is the ability to provide Google with an XML sitemap. Dan told us that a Google sitemap can be used to provide them with URLs that they would otherwise not be able to find because they weren’t linked to from anywhere else. He used the term “walled garden” to describe a set of pages that are linked only to each other but not linked from anywhere else. He said that you could simply submit one of the URLs via your sitemap, and then they’d crawl the rest. He also talked about how sitemaps were good for getting pages indexed that could be reached only via webforms. He did admit later that even though those pages would be likely to be indexed via the sitemap, at this time they would still most likely be considered low quality since they wouldn’t have any PageRank. Google is working on a way to change this in the future, however.

Flash and AJAX

Lastly, Dan mentioned that Google still isn’t doing a great job of indexing content that is contained within Flash and/or AJAX. He said that you should definitely limit your use of these technologies for content that you want indexed. He provided a bit of information regarding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), and explained that when used in the manner for which it was intended, it’s a perfectly acceptable solution for Google. (You can read more about sIFR here: http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr.) Dan said that Google does hope to do a better job of indexing the information contained in Flash at some point in the future.

The Q&A

Many of the points mentioned above were also covered in greater detail during Dan’s extensive Q&A session. However, there were many additional enlightening tidbits that got covered. For instance, Sherwood Stranieri from Catalyst Online asked about Google’s new Universal Search, specifically as it applied to when particular videos (that were not served up from any Google properties) would show up in the main search results. Dan explained that in Universal Search, the videos that show up are the same that show up first while using Google’s video search function.

The Dreaded Supplemental Results

Of course, someone just *had* to ask about supplemental results and what causes pages to be banished there. (This is one of the most common questions that I hear at all SEO/SEM conferences.) Dan provided us with some insights as to what the supplemental results were and how you could get your URLs out of them. He explained that basically the supplemental index is where they put pages that have low PageRank (the real kind) or ones that don’t change very often. These pages generally don’t show up in the search results unless there are not enough relevant pages in the main results to show. He had some good news to report: Google is starting to crawl the supplemental index more often, and soon the distinction between the main index and the supplemental index will be blurring. For now, to get your URLs back into
the main results, he suggested more incoming links (of course!).

There was a whole lot more discussed, but I think this is enough to digest for now! All in all, my SEMNE co-founder Pauline and I were extremely pleased with how the night unfolded. We had a great turnout, met a ton of new contacts, caught up with a bunch of old friends, and received some great information straight from Google!

For more information on SEMNE or to see some photos from the event, please visit the SEMNE site here: http://www.semne.org/. I’m running late today, but will try to have the pictures up sometime tonight if I can.

CEO and founder of High Rankings®, Jill Whalen has been performing search engine optimization since 1995 and is the host of the free High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter, author of “The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines” and founder/administrator of the popular High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum. In 2006, Jill co-founded SEMNE, a local search engine marketing networking organization for people and companies in New England.

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