Articulate Talks - Writing for the web - July 4 2013
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Originally presented by Matthew Stibbe at ClubWorkspace, Chiswick on 4 July 2013. For more Articulate Events see: http://www.articulatetraining.co.uk/events/
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Articulate Talks - Writing for the web - July 4 2013
- 1. Matthew Stibbe matthew@articulatemarketing.com @mstibbe www.articulatemarketing.com www.articulatetraining.co.uk * Not actual size Writing for the web
- 12. Why are we here? The most important thing
- 13. What is your website for?
- 14. Business goals • More business • More visitors • Length of stay • Conversions • Sharing and social media clout • Recency / frequency (tribal)
- 15. There’s light at the end of the funnel What people do and what you want them to do
- 16. Visitor lifecycle • Find • Evaluate • Navigate • Engage (Read / use) • Act • Share • Return
- 17. Find
- 18. Evaluate
- 19. Navigate
- 20. Engage
- 21. Act
- 22. Share ‘Hey, I found this great website…’
- 26. A snapshot of TurbineHQ.com Find 4827Visits Evaluate 1122Stay longer than 10 second Navigate 1216Visit more than one page Engage 696Visit the plans and prices page Act 112Sign up for a free trial Return 915Are returning visitors Share 102Are social visitors
- 27. Find How to make your website easier to find
- 28. Think like a reader
- 29. You can buy visitors
- 30. Landing pages are the new home pages
- 32. Find keywords Google Ads Keyword Tool
- 33. Writing for SEO
- 34. Google’s SEO tips Google SEO Guide • Write easy to read text • Stay organised around the topic • Create fresh, unique content • Create content primarily for your users, not search engines
- 36. Better anchor text for links
- 37. Page summaries
- 39. Use reader’s words not yours
- 40. Good title and summary
- 42. Google+ is for SEO
- 43. Evaluate Grab ‘em and don’t let go
- 44. People hate slow websites • 0.1 seconds feels instantaneous • 1 second keeps the user's flow of thought seamless. Users can sense a delay, but they still feel in control. • 1-10 seconds keeps the user's attention but they feel at the mercy of the computer • After 10 seconds, they usually leave.
- 45. So do customers
- 46. Test your pages Google Page Speed, ySlow, Loads.in
- 47. Stupid things • Auto-play music or video • Flash animations • Intro animations • Reinvent the user interface • Rotating banners
- 49. Trust marks
- 50. Headlines - Alliteration For emphasis • A display that’s not just smaller. It’s smarter.
- 51. Headlines - Rhyme Creates more impact, even with end rhymes • iPad isn’t just capable, it’s portable, too. • The world’s largest – and smartest – collection of apps.
- 53. Headlines - Analogy iPhone 5 is made with a level of precision you’d expect from a finely crafted watch, not a smartphone.
- 55. Navigate Help people find what you want them to buy
- 57. Provide a search box Google Site Search or Relvannsi for WordPress
- 58. Site maps Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools
- 59. Related content
- 60. Engage Okay, so now what?
- 61. Original ATTRACTIONS Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In 1996, some of the most popular places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors), Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum (100,000), Carhenge (86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (28,446). In the scenic Pine Region of the state, Fort Robinson played a role in a number of battles with Native Americans. But it is best remembered as the place where Chief Crazy Horse surrendered in 1877, after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the defeat of Lt. Col. George Custer. Crazy Horse was later stabbed to death by a soldier at the fort. …
- 62. Concise ATTRACTIONS In 1996, six of the best-attended attractions in Nebraska were Fort Robinson State Park, Scotts Bluff National Monument, Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum, Carhenge, Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer, and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park. In the Pine Region, Fort Robinson is best remembered as the place where Chief Crazy Horse surrendered after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Today, with some 50 original structures still standing, this important landmark is part of a 22,000-acre state park. Frontier artifacts are displayed in the former post headquarters. …
- 63. Scannable ATTRACTIONS Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In 1996, some of the most popular places were: • Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors) • Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166) • Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum (100,000) • Carhenge (86,598) • Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002) • Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (28,446). …
- 64. Objective ATTRACTIONS Nebraska has several attractions. In 1996, some of the most-visited places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors), Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum (100,000), Carhenge (86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (28,446). In the state's Pine Region, Fort Robinson played a role in a number of battles with Native Americans. It is the location where Chief Crazy Horse surrendered in 1877, after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and the defeat of Lt. Col. George Custer. Crazy Horse was later stabbed to death by a soldier at the fort. …
- 65. Combined ATTRACTIONS In 1996, six of the most-visited places in Nebraska were: • Fort Robinson State Park • Scotts Bluff National Monument • Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum • Carhenge • Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer • Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park. • Fort Robinson In the state's Pine Region, Fort Robinson is the place where Chief Crazy Horse surrendered after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Today, with some 50 original structures still standing, this landmark is part of a 22,000-acre state park. Frontier artifacts are displayed in the former post headquarters.
- 66. Visual hierarchy
- 67. Additional Advise At this point Commence Consequently Ensure In excess of In respect of In the event of Particulars Per annum Persons Prior to Purchase Regarding Terminate Whilst More Warn Now Start So Do More than About If Details A year People Before Buy About End While
- 69. Act The art of influence
- 71. Scarcity
- 72. Social proof
- 73. Authority
- 74. Liking
- 75. Calls to action • Strong verbs • Give instructions • Show what you get • Explain the benefit • Use colour • Make it all clickable • Avoid ‘click here’ etc. • Anti-objection copy (eg ‘Privacy guaranteed’ or ‘no credit card required’)
- 76. Test the copy 5.95% conversion 2.53% conversion
- 77. A/B Testing Google Content Experiments in Google Analytics
- 78. Share You’ve got to be social
- 79. Add sharing buttons Jet Pack
- 80. Share yourself Bufferapp, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, If this then that
- 81. Who should do it? (Hat tip SocMedSean.com)
- 82. YouTube
- 83. Social media tips • Keep it short • Find your best time • Give instructions • Ask questions
- 84. Build it and they will come
- 85. Return Get them to come back
- 86. Build an email list mailchimp.com
- 87. Secrets of successful emails
- 89. Set some targets
- 90. Non-existent copy is free
- 91. Sometimes a picture *is* worth a thousand words
- 92. Less is more
- 93. Towards a one-page site?
- 94. Make things as simple as possible (but not simpler)
- 95. The minimum viable website
- 96. Ten tasks for tomorrow 1. Review your analytics 2. Write a customer persona 3. Write a blog post 4. Write a tweet 5. Edit a page 6. Set up a mailing list in Mailchimp 7. Run a speed test on your website 8. Do a peer comparison against other sites 9. Set a target for social media activity 10. Write a page review checklist and apply it
Editor's Notes
- I’m going to tell you who I am and what I do at the end; keep you in suspenseHelp you write better copy, get found, brief better, know good and bad, etc.I think this was advertised as ‘ten things you can do to improve your website.’ I lied. Its probably more than 100This is going to move fastAsk questions / questions at the end of each section and at the endWill be picking on people to answer questions from time to time. Get over it.Slide deck on AT tomorrow; email me for questions; video on AT in a few weeksIf you missed my last talk – it’ll be up on the site in a week or so as a video. This is a matching pair of purdeys.Don’t do as I do, do as I say. I break some of the rules; the state of the art is slightly ahead of our ability to manage websitesFill in your forms.Loos. Food. Drink. That way --Who has a website?Hands up?Can edit the text on it in a CMS?Built it yourself?Run a business?I have a lot!
- Work in progress on new Turbine
- We do this stuff for clients too
- We don’t do website design but occasionally we manage website development projects for people and this was a pro bono project, just in case we were accused of lacking ambition.
- What do you want your website to DO!
- It’s never over.Your website is like marketing and sales, you don’t stop
- I’m going to tell you who I am and what I do at the end; keep you in suspenseI think this was advertised as ‘ten things you can do to improve your website.’ I lied. Its more like TK NUMBERThis is going to move fastAsk questions / questions at the end of each section and at the endWill be picking on people to answer questions from time to time. Get over it.Slide deck on AT tomorrow; email me for questions; video on AT in a few weeksIf you missed my last talk – it’ll be up on the site in a week or so as a video. This is a matching pair of purdeys.Don’t do as I do, do as I say. I break some of the rules; the state of the art is slightly ahead of our ability to manage websites
- Examples?
- “Users will read about 20% of the text on the average [web] page.” – Jakob NielsenApproximately 4.4 seconds for every 100 words
- 40% use search box on your site
- Examples of engagingReading somethingWatching a videoLooking at a product
- Buying somethingFilling out a formSigning up for a trialCall to Action or CTA or conversionEveryone has a CTA – ask round the room – what do you people on your website to do?
- Examples?
- BL mostly SEO traffic – needs more returnees so we’re working on social sharing, newsletter signups etc.Turbine mostly paying users – needs more ‘new visitors’ so we’re working on demand gen, lead-nurture etc. to drive trial signupsThese numbers echoed in depth and length, frequency and recency of visits – we’ll talk a bit about that later.
- Not going to tell you which time period! I lie awake at night dreaming of doubling the number of Turbine trial signupsSo what can we infer from this data?(If we just looked at visitor numbers and visits count we’d be pretty happy with this)That’s vanity stats% of people who stay, conversion is about 10%Cheaper to work on loss rates and engagement and conversion than shovelling more into the top of the funnelThe loss rate for this is horrendousAnd if you’re shovelling in money for advertising at the top, optimising the funnel has a big returnCopywriting can help at each stage of this journey
- What do they needWhat do they wantWhat other media do they consumer, readWhat is their attitudes to your product and your competitors
- There is an argument for thisBut you need some expertise to do SEM and you need to watch the cost per conversion like a hawkBut sometimes paying a lot for customers makes sense
- Companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7x more leads than those with fewer than 10. (HubSpot)Write really specific pages that you update regularly and which can be hero anchor content for you.Turn popular blog posts into resource pagesDominate a single SEO keyword, e.g. in this case ‘wordpressseo’The more links, the more credibilityThis has a page rank of 5/10 – likely to be first for relevant terms3-4 is average(8 is for huge companies, 9 is for something like CNN or Yahoo.com, 10 is for something like Microsoft, Apple)Lots of plugins rate page rank, including the Google bar
- How much money does Yoast have to spend to get traffic this way? None!Dominate a single SEO keyword, e.g. in this case ‘wordpressseo’The more links, the more credibilityThis has a page rank of 5/10 – likely to be first for relevant terms3-4 is average(8 is for huge companies, 9 is for something like CNN or Yahoo.com, 10 is for something like Microsoft, Apple)Lots of plugins rate page rank, including the Google bar(Incidentally, use anon page view to test SEO rankings because Google uses cookies to track what you like)
- You can find keywords and then see what’s popular and what gets traffic and aim for the intersection of low competition and high searches
- Write for peopleThe example Matt gave is: don’t just write, “Mt. Everest Height” but write, “How high is Mt. Everest?” because that is how people search.
- Good writing is good SEONot keyword stuffing or link farming or any other voodoo stuff
- Use H1 and H2 properly to match visual hierarchy
- Outsourced accountancy NOT Financial Management SolutionsIf you’re tempted to capitalise it, it’s probably wrong
- Here is the page from Turbine about purchase orders, with the google preview
- Author tags
- Count to ten with elephants
- Make people wait 2 seconds and you’ll see a -4.3% drop in revenue, and a similar drop in clicks.Microsoft research herehttp://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/bing-and-google-agree-slow-pag.htmlBy the way, Google also measures page speed
- Restaurant sites are the worst for this
- Sometimes a phone numberWhat other examples of things would make you trust a siteA person’s face or nameAn address
- Examples?
- Examples?
- Make it easy for people to leave the wrong page quicklyDon’t break the back button
- We’ve been trained by google40% of people will use a search box if there is oneRelevanssi or Google Site Search
- Google readable and human readableAlso warn you about viruses, some outages (site24x7), and search words used to find you
- Help people find stuff like this stuffCan handwrite it
- NN GROUPMeasured:Task timeMemoryTime to recall structureSubjective satisfaction, quality, ease of use, likeability, user effectAll things you want to influence
- 50% word count reduction
- Made easier to read with landing points for the eyes and shorter paragraphs
- Remove hype words and focus on facts
- DISCUSS: What do you think these patterns mean for how you write on the page?Eye tracking studies – how 232 readers ‘read’ a web page“Users will read about 20% of the text on the average [web] page.” – Jakob NielsenApproximately 4.4 seconds for every 100 wordsPut your most important content on the left and at the top!Concise (-50%)Scannable – bulletsObjective – no hype words+ 200% readability= Credibility, impact
- DISCUSS: Why is it important to use fewer words?Respect the reader’s time. Get to the point and stay there. Compared to printed text, halving the word count makes online copy 58 percent more usable (in terms of reading time, reader recall and subjective satisfaction). There are several ways to make your writing more concise:Eliminate unnecessary words.Short words are best. Replace long words where possible.Short sentences are good too.Aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score over 60. You can evaluate web pages using my readability analysis tool.Split long content into separate pages, posts or entries.Wait an hour then re-read and edit what you’ve written
- Robert Cialdini
- Scarcity
- Social proofThis principle relies on people's sense of "safety in numbers."For example, we're more likely to work late if others in our team are doing the same, put a tip in a jar if it already contains money, or eat in a restaurant if it's busy. Here, we're assuming that if lots of other people are doing something, then it must be OK.We're particularly susceptible to this principle when we're feeling uncertain, and we're even more likely to be influenced if the people we see seem to be similar to us. That's why commercials often use moms, not celebrities, to advertise household products.
- AuthorityWe feel a sense of duty or obligation to people in positions of authority. This is why advertisers of pharmaceutical products employ doctors to front their campaigns, and why most of us will do most things that our manager requests.
- Overcoming objections
- Best way to do this is to test different versions.Just saying ‘click here’ isn’t enough.This should be measured in Google Analytics as a conversionIf you can’t measure it, what’s it doing on your website?
- The copy should be part of usability testing.It should also be part of your of your ongoing A/B testing My other business is TurbineHQ.com – online HR admin – and I did some split testing on different copy variants. The results are conclusive. Short text beat long text 11 conversions to 5 and a conversion rate of 5.95% to 2.53%. This is an improvement of 135% overall.Google Content Experiments / Optimizely
- Make it easy to share
- Google+ - see on Google Maps CoordinateAdd sharing buttons. We use JetPack. Pick 2-4.Sometimes the unexpected can be best – Stumbleupon, Flightaware etc.
- Got nearly 300,000 views over a couple of years doing unboxing videos
- FB posts 80 characters or less have 27% higher engagement ratesOn FB brands that posted outside office hours did better and engagement rates were 18% higher on ThursdaysPosts with questions have a 15% higher engagement rate
- Remember field of dreams – the catch phrase has outlived the movie.If you make remarkable content, people WILL share it. Trying to viral is like trying to be cool. It’s a shrodingbug. Just trying to do it guarantees failure. (MORE ON THIS LATER)Benchmark against peers and competitors – you don’t have to out run the lion, you just have to outrun the other missionaries
- Most sales don’t happen on the first visit. A repeat visitor is a hot prospect.I’ve had 1.8m visitors to BL over the years and my biggest regret is not getting them to sign for newslettersLink to CRM and email systemGive people a reason to subscribe
- People tend to click more on the top and not scroll downThen write fantastic newsletters – we’re transitioning from a sales-eDM form to a more friendly, more concise versionTry to segment your lists and write relevant emailsRelevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. (Source: Jupiter Research)Capture names and companies if possiblePersonalized emails improve click-through rates by 14%, and conversion rates by 10%. (Source: Aberdeen Group)Secrets is the most clicked lead nurturing subject line word (HubSpot)
- Car on a rolling road – lots of activity but little progressBenchmark competitors – twitter followers, website traffic (Alexa), design, copy etc.Vanity metrics vs. business metricsNumbers that make your boss feel good but which are really slippery and hard to nudgeVs. numbers that make your account feel good and which you can do something to influence todayFocus on things you can influenceNumber of epic content pages or keyword-optimised landing pagesQuality of calls to actionConversion ratiosEngagement, recency, frequency
- Europe’s largest hedge fund
- Arguably the world’s best coffeeAnd, IMHO, the world’s best website
- Most corporate websites are like Yahoo! There’s a ton of links and stuff on the home page. Lots of content and it’s a bit overwhelming.
- Only a handful of things you can click on here.(Optimisation left unchecked leads porn or gambling)The home page problem
- Optimisation – porn / gambling
- Mojicamp $1,200 app. Website in a day. A bit of Twitter. Ready to launch.
- Number 11: call Articulate!
- Please stay and chat – drink more drink, eat more food.