Let’s continue with the start-up, Scenario 1, which we were covering in Part 1 of this series. The web designer supplies no sales copy at all, so you have no content for your website or for the products that are at the wholesale warehouse. Also, you don’t need to submit your site every month – for a multitude of reasons, and you don’t need to have your site listed in 2,500 search engines.
If you have your site respectably listed with Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Netscape, and Alta Vista – that is a huge amount of traffic. It is arguable that you could be listed in another ten more of the top search engines, but 2,500 is ludicrous and will not bring in any significant traffic. Google, alone, is a juggernaut and brings us much more than 50% of our current traffic.
One more thing about services that constantly submit your site to the search engines, without changing any of the content; this is a form of spamming. The major search engines may penalize your ranking or ban you all together. Please consult with a qualified SEO expert, before getting repeatedly submitted to thousands of search engines that you don’t need.
Scenario 2: A copywriter who lets his web designer dictate how his sales copy should look. Yes, this is a true story, and there are so many pretty colors on the page, you can’t read the black type over them. Believe it or not, he also brokers web design services, and has web design listed as one of his services.
Again, does anyone smell a fire? If you can’t read a web page, you should run as far as you can from the web designer. If a business website doesn’t effectively sell, it’s either the sales copy, or the web design that’s not working; it’s that simple – but you can avoid the problem by letting a competent copywriter have the last say.
You don’t need a lot of color to have a great website that sells. Black print, on a light background, will do fine, and is easier on the eyes. Blue for hyperlinks is user-friendly and easily recognized. Bolding a headline, or sub-headline, is good. Using bullets, or check marks, to point out benefits, will help point the reader to what’s in it for him or her.
Break up your paragraphs and air out your copy. You can use yellow for highlighting and for a background in your boxes. Use boxes for testimonials or very strong points. Using red in reserve for headlines, and sub-headlines, will draw eyes, so make sure you are drawing attention to something very important.
All of the above-mentioned web sales copy techniques are conservative, and all of them are highly effective on the Internet. Have a few people read the website to see what “buttons get pushed.”
Lastly, please remember, if you want your site to sell, “content is King,” and sales copy overrides design every time.