Andrew Hallinan » Copywriting

Search Strategies – For All Departments | Andrew Hallinan’s SEO

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 01:23:13 +0000

If you follow my blog, you know the importance of integrating search marketing activities into every aspect of your corporation. It’s important for literally every type of marketing, advertising, and public relations! But what do these departments actually need to know about search? Here are some key information that every department needs to know about you’re your search marketing strategy.

Your customers are searching for different things every day. For all advertising that your corporation kicks off, it’s absolutely essential that your organic search strategy is part of the planning process. What are the particular taglines and products that you will be promoting? How will your advertising efforts cause people to search for your product or service?

Here’s a great example. Lately, I’ve been searching around local shops for a fly fishing rod and reel – but the problem is that fly fishing isn’t a huge sport here in Florida, and so no shops carry them. I drove an hour away to the nearest Dicks Sporting Goods only to find that they too did not carry such a great item.

I was driving in my car the other day, and I heard a radio ad for a local sporting goods store having a special – “Buy a fly rod and get a free fly fishing reel!” I was excited and made a mental note of the company name and website.

Throughout the day, life happened, and all I could remember was the promotion – not the name of the business, the location, or the website. Not even a hint! I tried to search for their promotion, but alas, I could not find them. They certainly lost my business for having a poor search strategy.

Your offline advertising is searching for searchers. Your offline advertising is attracting the same people as your online advertising. It’s all connected! If you share data between departments, you’ll be surprised at how much better you’ll understand your customers. You will be able to provide a better, more intimate marketing message to your customers.

Ensuring Corporate Search Strategy

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 00:13:09 +0000

Of course you know that search engine optimization needs to be a core part of any online business’ strategy online. But how can we make sure this information helps large websites and multiple departments so that our content strategies are the best possible strategies company-wide? This article will discuss how to implement effective search marketing strategies. Companies today need to implement these areas to ensure the maximum search engine exposure on their large websites.

1. Make sure that your website can be discovered by the search engines (duh!)

If the search engines have not discovered your website, you’re in trouble! Your web architecture is extremely important in this process. All website development teams need to create websites and web pages in a way that they can be crawled and indexed easily by the search engines. But search strategy doesn’t stop there!

Upper management us a core ingredient to productive search marketing strategy. Management teams should provide the support that will be crucial for making your web architecture the most search engine friendly that it can be. If you are a manager overseeing a development team, you should be much more concerned with functional outcomes rather than implementation. In layman’s terms, you need to be more concerned with easy to navigate menu systems rather than Flash menus that look “cool”. Your nice looking navigation systems are not going to sell your products any better, and may deter future users from using your website accurately.

2. Every person in the company should be on board with your search strategy goals.

Your market research teams, marketing teams, product development teams, site development teams, and those creating company visions – everyone! – needs to be on board and understand how much value can come from search data – and how to make great use of it. There needs to be collaboration at the highest level and all marketing arms (online advertising, email marketing departments, offline marketing departments, etc) all need to share search marketing data and really understand how this data impacts their own departments.

3. Content writers need to “get it.”

Your company’s content writers need to understand the importance of great keyword researchers, searcher personas, and searcher behavior. No one should write a piece of content unless they first answer the following questions:

a. What are the company goals for this page?

b. What are we trying to get the person to when they get to this page?

c. Why would a visitor find this page from the search engines? What would they be looking to get or do?

d. Why would this visitor want to become a conversion?

4. Your offline marketing teams need to be up to date with your search strategies.

All offline marketing campaigns really need to have your core search strategies components to it. We need to make sure that these departments understand how searches might be derived from their marketing efforts. From there, they need to take it a step further and really think about what the searcher’s experience would be. Any advertising agencies that are working with your company and building web content to support your offline marketing need to have search-friendliness as a core and critical requirement.

Building Search Into Your Organization

admin — Tue, 04 May 2010 00:44:50 +0000

Most corporations understand that a great search strategy relies mostly on incorporating the absolute best practices throughout their organizations. It can become a nightmare as a corporation’s activities start to become separated from each other. Departments often have territorial or political reasons for not talking and communicating interdepartmentally, and sometimes the organization of these departments prohibit excellent communication across multiple branches.

The key to great support comes from the top down. If your upper management creates an environment which is central to having search strategies a priority, then it can then be a goal shared by the entire corporation. Upper management absolutely needs to provide the necessary resources for search integration and to make sure that all departments are motivated to create great upward momentum to the search marketing strategy.

Here are some tips to great content architecture across your organization.

1. Make sure that your website has the most useful and functional information architecture possible

Make sure that multiple pages don’t have similar or thin content. Will your website’s visitors be confused at all? Is the page they access relevant to the information they’re looking for? Don’t ever confuse your visitors, and don’t ever show them something they aren’t looking for. Keep it simple!

2. Make sure that the copy on your website speaks to your customer

Keyword research is a huge part of this. You must make absolutely certain that anyone writing web copy has access to (and understands) your keyword research. Make sure they use this research in the writing and development of web copy – if your core demographic is high school children, don’t write using the vocabulary of someone with a PHD.

3. Although your meta keywords tag is not helpful in search engine optimization, it can be helpful in collaboration.

Often, a company will spend countless dollars and time on research about how to speak to their customer, how to create the best marketing calls, marketing segments, and then a copywriter will change the message without realizing all of the energy that was put into the message. To help avoid this, make sure the copywriter has coordinated site wide, and make sure they incorporate the correct keywords into the content. Don’t focus too much on keyword density, but rather on providing valuable content.

4. Remember that every page of your site is a possible entry point.

Every page of your website is a possible entry point for your customer and should be developed using this mentality. Make sure that each page clearly states the primary subject, provides contextual navigation and momentum about the rest of the website, helps the visitor complete a task/find what they were looking for, and to motivate the visitor into your sales funnel. Pages often don’t have a strong call to action and conversions may suffer greatly.

Your corporation should create a checklist for each page to ensure all of these actions get met.

5. Make sure that your website has a great internal linking structure.

This is absolutely crucial to make sure that you have an easily crawlable website. At least one internal link should be in place to each page of your website. A page that does not have an internal link to it is called an “orphan page” and will never be seen by the search engines.

6. Think about what you’re going to link to from the home page.

Your website’s home page is the page that most visitors will see – so it’s important that you link to your most important pages. Search engines also recognize this, and they use your home page link architecture as a sign of what your most important pages are.

How to Make Your Blog Readable

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:51:49 +0000

Do you ever get bored reading a newspaper or lose focus when reading a book? Internet users are far worse – with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and all sorts of other distractions, here’s a few ways to ensure that your content gets read.

1) Remember that people are reading a blog.

Remember – people are sitting down to read a blog, not a technical report. Try to get your main point out quickly and efficiently without boring the user. Remember, less is better.

2) Try blogging using bullets or numbered lists.
Generally, when I blog, I try to blog with bullet points, lists, or numbers. 90% of my readers are not going to really read anything except the bullet points, so I make them relevant, easy to remember, and useful.

3) Use images in your blogs.

Blogging with images and other breaks can really help to keep a person’s attention span. Don’t overdo it, but certainly use images to spice up your blog’s life.

4) Bloggers should use a lot of white space.

By using white space, you’re able to keep the reader’s attention. The less words there are in an area, the easier it is you’re the person reading your blog to keep focused on what you’re trying to communicate.

5) Make use of font control.

Make use of your bold button. Bold your key sentences and phrases, and make sure people can get the “gist” of your entire article or blog post by skimming your bolded sentences.

Andrew Hallinan invites you to discover more about your blogging potential by visiting www.synergy-seo.com

What Is Web Copy?

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:42:51 +0000

Introduction:

Copywriting is basically marketing. The objective is to write a headline that then makes people want to read your first sentence, your first sentence to bring the reader to your second, and so on. The ultimate goal is that by the end of your sales letter or website copy, your reader then has their mouth watering so much that the only logical choice is to buy, and buy NOW!

Copywriting can include everything from unique selling point (slogans) to articles about your product or service. Understanding copywriting is absolutely essential to your web copy marketing campaign.

There are two main objectives to writing web copy.

The reason for copy is to sell your product or service – whether its copy on your brochure, your website, a flyer – anything – it’s main objective is to sell. Web copy, however, is designed to do two things:

Primary Objective: Sell

Secondary Objective: Boost Search Engine Rankings

Generally speaking, copywriting is the aspect of choosing just words and text – not really the LOOK of the copy. But when it comes to web copy, all aspects are considered. Headlines, placement, colors, etc. are all highly valued attributes.

Since the main idea of copywriting is to sell an idea, product or service, its absolutely vital that a small business owner understands what makes up good copy. Quality content that captures the potential customer’s attention and effectively communicates the features, benefits, and a call to action, is good copy.

Tip: Speak directly to your target audience.

Effective copy is going to speak directly to your target audience. Its going to offer very useful information that will captivate and motivate them, address their concerns, answer common questions, and explain your product or service in your copy.

Your copy should make your readers feel that they want (or even better – that they NEED) your product or service. You have to prove to them that they cannot live without your product.

Often times, writing copy from the point of view of your target audience can really help. Try to use language that they would use. Talk like they would talk. You have to relate to them on a deeper level or they’ll just “bounce” off your website and onto someone elses.

To write good web copy, you need to accurately portray your passion for your product or service to your customers. Some people are excellent at this, and some people are terrible and need to hire someone to do this for them.

Good luck!

27 Most Effective Headline Words of All Time

admin — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:48:02 +0000

Now Announcing the 27 Most Effective Headline Words of All Time

It’s Time to Discover the Secret Words That Your Competitors Don’t Want You to Find Out!

Headlines are the most important part of your entire website. Think of the last time that you went to the book store and bought a book. Why did you pick it up? What was the first thing you saw when you looked at it?

Chances are pretty good that you picked the book up after reading the title, and then turned the book over and read the back. After deciding the book looked interesting, you decided to purchase it. You pulled out your wallet and spent $8-$18 because of a catchy headline and some good text on the back of the book. You became a “conversion.” A “conversion” happens when you turn someone who is just browsing your site into a buyer.

A good “conversion rate” is typically around 1-3%. That means that if 100 people come to your website, 1-3 people buy. With good copy, good headlines, and great website design, however, you could even see upwards of 5-12%! That is what you strive for.

Headlines need to convert people’s interest. The only purpose of a headline is to make the reader read your first sentence. It then takes a good first sentence to make the reader read the second sentence and the third, etc. Getting people to your website is easy – getting them to become a sale or conversion, is not.

Try as often as you can to incorporate one the key benefits of your website’s product or service into your headline. For example, someone advertising a new air purifier could say:

“Facts You Should Know About How to Instantly Kill 99.9% of Air-Born Bacteria That Will Harm Your Family”

See? You’re taking the benefit, which is, “Kills 99.9% of air born bacteria,” and turning it into a catchy headline.

Also remember:
Words in quotation marks are read and retained 80% more often!

Most copywriters make the mistake of writing the copy first, and then the headline. This is wrong! Never do that. Always write a killer headline first, and then write your killer copy.

Now here we go:
1. Announcing
“Now announcing the secrets to acne treatment.”
“Announcing: Going out of business sale!”

2. Secrets of
“How to Discover the Secrets to Better Intimacy.”
“Order now, and Discover the Secrets of Success!”

3. New
“Now Announcing This New Secret That Everybody Is Talking About!”
“Discover New Secrets to Weight Loss!”

4. Now
“The Time To Buy Is Right Now.”
“There Has Never Been a Time Like Right Now!”

5. Amazing
“Order Now for Your Amazing New Kit”
“Now Introducing the Most Amazing New Vacuum Cleaner”

6. Facts (You Should Know)
“Facts You Should Know About Healthcare”
“Facts You Should Know About Weight Loss”

7. Breakthrough
“Click Here For Your Breakthrough New Report”
“Now Announcing a Medical Breakthrough”

8. At Last
“At Last, an Easy Way to Make Money Online!”
“At Last, the Answers You Deserve!”

9. Advice to
“Advice to Lower Your Mortgage Payments by Half!”
“Advice on How to Stop Acne Before It Happens!”

10. Truth of
“Do You Want to Know the Truth of How to Lose Weight?”
“At Last, Learn the Truth of How to Live a Better Lifestyle”

11. Protect
“How to Protect Your Family Even When You Are Away From Home”
“At Last, a Secure Way to Protect Your Investments”

12. Life
“Here’s How to Live the Life You’ve Always Dreamed About”
“Discover the Secrets to a Happy Love Life”

13. Here
“Here, You Will Find What You Have Been Looking For”
“If You Want to Get Rich Online, Start Here”

14. Discover
“Discover the Secret New Way to Protect Your Investment”
“Here is Where You Will Discover Secrets That Will Change Your Life”

15. Yes
“Yes, At Last, Your Search Is Over!”
“Yes, Send Me My Free Report!”

16. Bargain(s)
“Looking For a Bargain? Look No Further!”
“Now Introducing the Best Bargain You’ll Ever Find Online”

17. Do You
“Do You Want to Discover Your True Potential?”
“Do You Want to Buy a Bargain?”

18. Love
“Here Is How to Protect The Family You Love While You Are Away From Home”
“Looking For a Bargain? You’ll Love This!”

19. Hate
“Do You Hate Spam As Much As We Do? Read On!”
“How Much Do You Hate Your Sky-High Interest Rate?”

20. How Much
“You Have No Idea How Much This Will Change Your Life”
“How Much Is Too Much to Change Your Life?”

21. How Would
“How Would You Like to Lower Your Mortgage Payment?”
“How Would You Like to Win a Free Vacation to the Bahamas?”

22. This
“This Idea Can Change Your Life!”
“This Is Your Chance to Change Your Life”

23. Only
“Previously Only Shared to 200 People”
“Only You Can Decide to Change Your Life”

24. Sale
“Buy Now – This Is a One Time Sale!”
“Don’t Walk Away From the Greatest Bargain Sale of Your Life!”

25. Free
“Download Your Free Report!”
“570 Free Sales Letters and Business Forms!”

26. You
“You Are the Only Person Who Can Change Your Life”
“You Must Act Now”

27. How to
“How to Make Money Online Fast”
“How to Design Your Own Golf Course”