Impact Media's SEO Blog

Your website isn’t just another way to let people know where you are. It is the bridging point between your online and offline worlds, it is your businesses major mouthpiece, it is your leading marketing tool.

Once upon a time a laissez-faire approach to Internet marketing would have been understandable, if slightly unadvisable. However, today an Internet presence is a must for any business. Those who have worked hard to establish themselves online a reaping the rewards, whilst those who haven’t are having to work even harder to catch up.
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Welcome to the new look Impact Media website. We’ve undergone a major makeover to create a more usable and dynamic area for our visitors and clients.

With a new design, the website has a much brighter appearance with fresh content throughout to really help promote the services we offer. As a leading UK-based SEO Company, it is hugely important that the website be clear and concise in highlighting the work we do and how it can ultimately benefit potential clients.

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Let’s try an exercise together. While you’re reading this article, bring up your website at the same time. The title of this article is ‘Would you buy from your own website?’. Now, this takes a little bit of objectivity, but look at your website’s front page.

What does the page say? Does it say professional, credible and reassuring? Or does it say ‘doesn’t really know how to use a computer’. When someone comes to your website for the first time, they need clear guidance as how to navigate through the content of your site. The importance of navigation cannot be stressed enough, these days with the plethora of choices available, sites that are difficult to navigate receive little attention; the user simply starts looking somewhere else.

One of the most heinous crimes against your own website is to make the visitor feel like they need to trawl through pages to get to what they want. One click! That’s how long it should take for the visitor to find themselves on a page that relates to what they came looking for. Just one click. Pick one of your products and see how easy it is to get from your front page to that product without any inside knowledge. Remember, it should take one click.

Ask yourself, if you were on the High Street and all the shops were selling the same thing, how would you decide which shop to buy from? That’s how you need to consider your own website, what will make it stand out from the hundreds, or thousands of other companies online offering the same thing. If you’ve thought this through, you’ll probably come up with some of the following:

• Ease of Use
• Credibility
• Wide Selection
• Affordable Prices
• Great Customer Service
• Contact Details Available
• Happy Customers (Testimonials)

The final and probably one of the most important questions to ask is ‘how easy, smooth and reassuring is your checkout process?’ People will get cold feet and have second thoughts if they don’t feel confident using your checkout process. If they feel you start to lose credibility, if they suddenly have to make a phone call or if they don’t believe that their payment card details are definitely going to be safe, they will simply click away from your website, with one click. Then your competitors will be enjoying the fruits of your labours because now the potential customer wants to buy, but is just looking for an alternative vendor that makes the entire ordering and payment process easy and reassuring. If your website doesn’t have an easy and reassuring payment procedure, you’ll likely lose business at the moment when they’re ready to part with their money.

So take a look at each aspect of your website from the first page when you strive to grab their attention, to the simple ease to finding the specific product or service they came looking for, the credibility of offering great advice and a way to contact a human being by email, or preferably by telephone. Lastly, does your website’s checkout procedure exude confidence, credibility and reassurance? If not, your competitors will be getting your business.

If you’d like an independent yet affordable review of your site, you could do a lot worse that try UserTesting.com. You receive video of someone using your site as well as a written summary.

With the rise of the Internet as the most powerful business tool created, there has never been such a need for words. Regardless of developments in Internet video, the World Wide Web is still a text-driven medium. With blogs, articles, advertising and website text all needing words, copywriting has taken on a new importance in the battle for online presence. Words have always had great power, now they’ve taken on a vital significance for all companies that do business on the web.

But copywriting for the web is not like copywriting in the traditional sense. The requirements of Internet copy and the psychology of the Internet readership are very different from those involved in print copywriting. What’s more, SEO copywriting, the craft of creating copy that appeals both to human readers but also exploits SEO principles to attract higher Search Engine Rankings (SERPS) is an entirely different game.

The SEO copywriter needs to constantly balance the needs of their human reader with the need to maintain strong connections to Google and the other Search Engines. Writing for the Search Engines requires an awareness of what they are looking for. Ensuring that the article is topical, entirely original and contains the important keywords at an appropriate density is only the starting point of SEO copywriting.

The trouble is that even inserting the keywords is enough to flummox the average amateur copywriter. Sentences stuffed with keywords make little sense and the human reader clicks away to another page immediately.

Instead, SEO copy needs to appear like any other form of copy, well written, informative and engaging whilst retaining the highest possible optimisation factor. This requires expert writing skills to blend the SEO into the already tight copy.

Web copywriting is about grabbing the attention of the human reader who is already distracted by images, offers and enticements. Maintaining their interest with relevant and topical content known as ‘web copy’ is the next essential element of successful web copywriting. Web copy should differ from traditional written English because it is more accessible, less formal, and closer to the way that we speak.

The next stage is to lead the reader to the point of making a decision. The original meaning of the word ‘decision’ means to cut oneself off from all other options and choices. The persuasive copywriter invisibly removes all objections and concerns whilst leading the reader to the point of making the decision to click.

The aim of good web copywriting is to hook the human reader into staying at the website long enough to make that all-important click, to compel them to take action. This is the final stage of web copywriting.

Above all things, SEO copywriting creates crisp, attractive text that moves the reader towards the point of action. At the same time, it blends in optimisation techniques that ensure that the copy gets read. Without the SEO element, no matter how good the copy, if no one can find it, they cannot read it.

Excellent website copy is the correctly judged balance between highly compelling copy and expertly optimised text. If you need SEO copy, use SEO copywriting services.

When it comes to tracking and recording business website statistics, you will find that most web hosts will provide some kind of statistical package as part of your hosting arrangement.

However, these vary in quality and very often only give a superficial level of detail. If you’re a small business and serious with your Internet marketing efforts, be it search engine optimisation or pay per click, then you will want (need) to have a professional analytics package. There are many solutions out there, such as the brilliant Clicktracks Analyzer, but these solutions are often out of the reach for many small business owners.

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