Small Business By Design

In today’s culture and economy, its imperative that you have a web presence. Skeptical consumers simply need a viable place to go and explore your business’ offerings at their own pace, and get comfortable with your company before taking the step to try your product or invite you into their home or business for a consultation. It doesn’t have to be big, it can be as simple as a one page site.

But how to you develop the content for you website? Many businesses simply convert their existing print materials to the web and call it a day. But is there all there is to it? 

If you want to make the most of your website, it needs to be looked at with a different set of eyes than your traditional print marketing. You must look at it through the beady eyes of a web crawler.

Recently, while quoting a website redesign to one of my clients, he mentioned that he wanted to hire a copywriter to rewrite his website copy. Incidentally, I discovered and sent him this article, written by the principal of a major interactive company from my hometown, which discusses how to write search-engine friendly website copy. The article explains that when writing your website copy, you must always keep in mind its searchability and validity for web crawlers and site users.

Before you write your website copy, it is beneficial to do some research about how people are finding services like yours online. What are they referring to your product or service as—what phrases or “keywords” are they typing into their favorite search engine. Never fear, this is much easier than it sounds! Ask your customers and research your competitors’ websites for these keywords and trigger phrases. Put yourself into your customer’s shoes and “try to find” a company who does your line of business. What keywords/phrases were you compelled to search for? Which keywords/phrases yielded the best results? Compile all of this research into a comprehensive list.

Once you have your list, you can start drafting your website copy. Implement these keywords into your copy often, however make sure you do so in the most natural way possible. It is still important that the copy is reader-friendly and informative about your product/service and what exactly makes your company better than your competitors. Always keep your keywords in mind, and use them as much as possible, but don’t sacrifice your message for the use of one more keyword. 

Through implementation of keyword-rich copy, your site will should begin to rise in the natural search results of the major search engines. However, search-engine optimized copy isn’t the only way to boost your search engine ranking, there are many other pieces in this puzzle. Come back and visit again soon as I hope to write about more of these tactics in the near future. 

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to comment below or mosey on over to the my company’s website at www.strongdesignstudios.com to see what we can do for your website!