Tag Archives: Website Content Writing

6 Common Website Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

An effective business website helps you accomplish several sales and marketing goals at once. It provides you with SEO traction, drawing traffic and boosting brand awareness. It educates your buyers, providing them with confidence in your products and services, increasing the likelihood of conversion. It captures information that your sales team can use down the road, including names and email addresses from potential customers. It conveys your company’s professionalism and expertise. It extends meaningful calls to action.

That’s a pretty robust job description, and it should come as no surprise that some websites don’t quite measure up. The good news is that many of the most common website deficiencies are totally fixable; and often, all it really takes is a content upgrade.

Website Mistakes That Content Can Fix

1) Poor calls to action.

Let’s start with a pretty simple example. Every page of your website should have at least one clear call to action, inviting the reader to take the next step. This might mean signing up for your email newsletter, calling to set an appointment, or purchasing a product from your ecommerce store. If your site isn’t getting the results you’d like, it may be a case of low call to action quality or quantity.

2) Insufficient thought leadership.

One of the most important roles your website serves is earning the trust of your readers, something you achieve by demonstrating your expertise. If your website lacks meaningful thought leadership, it may be because you either don’t have a blog or you don’t update it as often as you should. Both are issues that a content marketing team can help you resolve.

3) No meta data.

Meta titles and meta descriptions play an important role in signifying to the search engine algorithms, and to search engine users, what your site is all about. Well-written meta data is crucial for SEO and can even help facilitate conversions. Neglecting meta data means forfeiting a valuable opportunity to improve your site’s effectiveness.

4) Poor SEO.

Meta titles and descriptions are just one example of how poor copywriting can lead to impoverished SEO. Consider also that well-written and substantive content, with naturally integrated keywords, can be essential for search engine success. It’s also critical to write and format your content in a way that recognizes the growing popularity of voice search. Again, a content marketing team can help raise the SEO value of your website’s copywriting.

5) Low quality writing.

More generally, having bad writing on your site can compromise your SEO potential while also diminishing your brand’s sense of professionalism. A good content team can help you replace lackluster content with writing that’s tight, clean, precise, engaging, and error-free.

6) Duplicate content.

This is an especially big problem for companies that have a lot of individual product or service pages. Repeating the same boilerplate copy on multiple pages hurts your SEO potential, and also makes the entire site less engaging to the reader. A good content writing team can help you think of fresh and unique ways to convey the necessary information, even when it’s a little repetitive by its very nature.

Make Your Website a Traffic-Generating, Sales-Converting Machine

A good website can fuel business growth in more ways than one. To ensure your website is performing at a peak level, consider consulting with a content writing team.

We’d love to help. To connect with Grammar Chic, call us at 803-831-7444 or visit www.grammarchic.net.

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5 Tips for Acing an E-Commerce CTA

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When you’re running an e-commerce brand, your website really has one central purpose: Yes, you want to bring new clients into your sales funnel and provide them with the education they need to make informed purchasing decisions, but at the end of the day your goal is to close the sale. You want people to click on a button in your online store and purchase one of the items you’re selling—period. You want your website to be an around-the-clock sales machine.

That’s what makes it so essential to have a good, strong call to action in place. All business websites need CTAs, which guide your leads through the sales funnel and increase the likelihood of them taking the desired action. For e-commerce sites, though, the CTA should be especially pointed and impactful: Click this button to buy our product NOW!

5 Tips for Killer CTAs

But of course, there are good CTAs and bad ones—and a feeble or unpersuasive CTA will hobble your sales and render your website impotent. So how do you ensure that your e-commerce site is working with high-impact CTAs? Consider these tips:

Make it stand out! The whole point of the call to action is to grab your reader’s attention and make it clear what step you want the reader to take next—so you can’t afford to have a CTA that blends in with the rest of the page, or that gets buried under the rest of your content. While it is possible to be too over-the-top, you do want to use larger fonts, bolds, italics, bright colors, compelling graphics, and/or attention-grabbing verbiage to draw the reader’s attention. The language of the CTA should spell out, in no uncertain terms, what you want the reader to do next.

Keep it short. Your readers want to see what you want them to do, and don’t necessarily want to wade through ten paragraphs of text to get to the point. Do you want them to click a button and buy your product? Tell them so—in a sentence or two at the very most.

Offer specifics and convey value. Just because you keep it short, that doesn’t mean you cannot offer some specifics. Adding specific offers and numbers is especially effective. Try something like: Save 30% by ordering NOW! Or, Claim your free gift card; buy today!

Place your CTAs strategically. You should have one on every page of the website—but beyond that, your placement may vary. Generally it is best to have a CTA visible on the page without the reader having to scroll—placing it either above the fold or in a sidebar can work well. Also, there’s no law against having multiple CTAs on one page, especially if the page is longer or more content-heavy.

Don’t forget to say thanks. The CTA/order page should ultimately take the reader to a Thank You page, which is an essential way for building brand loyalty. Never forget it!

For help crafting killer CTAs, of course, the Grammar Chic team is always on hand. Give us a call today at 803-831-7444, or visit http://www.grammarchic.net.

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Spruce Up Your Website for the Holiday Season

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Look: We understand that it’s only now mid-November… that Thanksgiving is still a couple weeks away, and for some of us Christmas seems pretty far off. Never mind that the malls already have their garlands and their Christmas music, that store shelves are fully stocked with yuletide candies and toys. Some may not be quite ready to think about the holiday season just yet, and that’s fine…

… unless you happen to be a small business owner. In which case, now is the time to start planning your holiday marketing and promotional campaigns. And that includes sprucing up your website.

There are plenty of ways to get your website holiday-ready, but most of them are going to require just a bit of advance planning—whether you do your website yourself or have a separate developer. Thus, if you want to have a website that pulls out all the stops and makes a big, festive splash, the time to build it is now.

We’ll recommend just a few possible avenues:

  • Remember that over the holidays, your visitors are going to have less time and more distractions than normal. They won’t necessarily have as much eagerness to peruse your full website—so make your point, and make it quick. Ensure that you have a strong call to action above the fold. Make e-mail sign-ups and social media buttons numerous, and highly visible.
  • One way to stand out, and to encourage users to dig deeper into your site, is to implement a carousel—a section of the site that has different images and text that rotate, each screen showing a different product or section of your site. It will take some work to get one up and running, but this can be a great way to showcase everything your business has to offer, even to those who are pressed for time.
  • Emphasize time sensitivity and urgency. Make prominent mention of holiday sales, noting their end dates. Also publicize when you need to receive orders to ensure delivery by Christmas Eve.
  • Offer some kind of a “bonus,” to entice customers to buy from you and not your competitor—or at least, to keep you in the running. Free shipping is an obvious one. Even if you always offer free shipping, make special note of it over the holidays.
  • Change your site color schemes to festive colors, or create some holiday-themed graphics or banners to include on your site. Help your customers get into the spirit of the season, and see if that doesn’t make them a bit more willing to spend money with you!

Really, anything you do to optimize your site for the holiday season is going to prove helpful to you—so get planning! And for more advice, don’t hesitate to contact Grammar Chic at 803-831-7444, or www.grammarchic.net.

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4 ‘About Us’ Page Myths

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Spend any time at all browsing small business websites and you’ll quickly realize that not all websites are created equal—and neither are all ‘About Us’ pages. That’s very much as it should be. After all, every small business is unique, so why wouldn’t every ‘About Us’ page be, too? Taking a cookie-cutter approach to your company’s ‘About Us’ page will only obscure what makes your business special.

With that said, there are certainly some general policies to follow—and some blunders to avoid. Unfortunately, not all ‘About Us’ pages are written with these best practices in mind. In fact, there are some pieces of conventional ‘About Us’ wisdom that may actually hurt your brand identity more than they help it—and we’ve rounded up four of them, below.

1. Your ‘About Us’ page is, well, about you!

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Despite its name, the ‘About Us’ page isn’t supposed to be entirely or even mostly about your company. On the contrary, a good ‘About Us’ page is just as much about your customers—and about the benefits they receive when they do business with you.

Your customers don’t need to know the full, play-by-play history of your brand. They want to know why they should care. They want to know what’s in it for them.

2. Your ‘About Us’ page needs to be lengthy and thorough.

On a related note, it is often believed that an ‘About Us’ page needs to be a fairly heavy and wordy document, and it’s probably true that it will be one of the larger sections of your website. Again, though, remember why you’re really writing it: To exhibit the benefits you offer to customers and clients. Try to make those points fairly directly; nobody has time to read a 2,000-word (or even a 1,000-word) ‘About Us’ section.

3. Your ‘About Us’ page should be highly personal.

Actually, this isn’t entirely a myth. Your ‘About Us’ page should serve to humanize your business; you might talk about who started the company, and why. You should definitely underscore your company’s values and principles. However, you shouldn’t use it as an excuse to tell your life story, or to veer too far off course from that central idea of sharing the benefits your company can provide.

4. Your ‘About Us’ page needs a Mission Statement, a list of Company Values, a set of Corporate Goals, etc.

There is nothing wrong with any of these things—not if they’re specific and convey something meaningful about your business. The problem is when companies think they have to have these things, and shoehorn them into their ‘About Us’ page, or else spout off a bunch of vague corporate-speak that offers little value to the consumers. If you have a great company Mission Statement, include it! If not, forget it.

In need of further ‘About Us’ page insights? Contact Grammar Chic, Inc. today: Visit www.grammarchic.net, or call 803-831-7444.

 

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