Internet Marketing Journal UK

I love doing real conversion focussed copywriting. Its one of my small pleasures. Was one of the biggest eye openers when I moved away from writing copy to drive traffic through natural search to writing copy to drive traffic that also converts. The first day that someone started talking about financial targets for a website just about had me running a mile - they wanted to make money not positions! One of the biggest choices you have to make is for the psychological make up of the product/service you are to rank/sell online.

Convince your Website Visitors to buy?

This one of my first strategies in conversion based SEO copywriting. Sitting down and looking through what makes visitors to a website buy. There is the obvious stuff:

1. Easy to read copy - no keyword laden SEO copywriting anymore
2. Easy to digest copy - shorter sentences with less technical jargon where possible
3. Easy to follow copy - give each page a theme and take the consumer with you
   1. Change in emphasis on a page start talking with the consumer not at them (after too many years at university was a shock)
4. Provide out going links - show them what other people say about the product or service
5. Provide testimonials - show them what other customers have said - combining that with the outgoing links works even better

All these things put the customer more at ease and helped convince the visitor that they had found what the needed. To my mind they still weren’t sold - conversion rate was too low. So I had to refine the technique further - removing all the barriers to sale.

Remove barriers to sale and sell more

There are two key barriers to sale: your site and your product. Fixing your site involves a lot of work and practice (and I’ll have to cover it off another day as I’ll bore you all to death). But the product based things can be really simple. Some of the biggest ways I’ve seen come from using the psychology of buying to help make more sales.

Silo your consumers buy their place in the buying process

The first thing is you’re going to have two types of website visitors : browsers and buyers. Each need a different message, a different set of content. This means that you need to get them to the content they require as quicly as possible. Buyers want to get in, find the product and get out. Browsers need a little push to buy your product: it could be price, it could be delivery time or it could be your reputation online. If your visitor came through a high quality SEO, PPC or affiliate campaign they should already have found the product. So what you need to do is silo your consumers.

One great way to silo is through your links. If you use a process known as framing you can ensure that your links psychologically point to the user to where they need to go as an idividual. So that big ‘buy now’ button is great but also provide some options for the browser ‘discover how product saves you time and money’, ‘get more views and opinions’ etc all add up to framing the context of where the link points.

Once you have your users siloed you’ll find that they convert far more frequently that ever before - and they make you and your clients more money. Clients who see money coming in are always more fun to work with than clients who don’t.