Many companies, particularly those offering consulting services or services with a high level of abstraction do a supremely poor job of conveying to their site visitors exactly what it is that they do. Perhaps they want to appear sophisticated in their self-description, or give the impression that what they do is so complicated that only four-syllable words can effectively convey the true core of their activities.
To state it bluntly: you need to write sense in order to sell your service.
This complex brand of language does nothing for your marketing. If you write a description of what your company does which is easily understood, but not perfectly accurate, you’ll be far more successful than if you perfectly describe what you do using language which requires a PhD in semantics to comprehend! It’s not necessary to describe the nature of your business in that kind of precision — you’ll have the opportunity to explain exactly what you do further while you discuss projects with your prospective client.
I’m not suggesting that you deceive your audience, however. There’s a huge difference between imprecise descriptive text and deceptive descriptive text.
Take, for example, a company which provides, as their principle service, management of pay-per-click campaigns, but also provides consulting on a wide range of search marketing issues. It is inaccurate to say that they are a PPC management company, because this is not their SOLE occupation. It does, however, efficiently convey two things: the company’s specific specialty and the industry that they are involved with. Deception would involve making a claim about the company which was false, rather than simply incomplete.
If you want to draw somebody in to further investigate what you offer, they need to understand some level of what you offer from the beginning. When the first scan of your copy leaves them wrinkling their brows with confusion, you’ve possibly already lost the sale. If that first look tells them that you provide at least an aspect of what they’re looking for, they’re much more likely to investigate further, initiate a conversation with you to explore services, or establish a contract.
Always let somebody who doesn’t know what the company does read your copy and provide feedback. Distance from the subject is priceless — and nobody inside your company has it.
I’ve been tagged by Bill Slawski in an interesting meme currently doing the rounds of search marketing bloggers. The meme is pretty self explanatory — tell the world why you blog (listing, ideally, five reasons) and then take a turn tagging five others. Michael Jensen of SoloSEO is once again tracking the meme, so you can wend your way to SoloSEO if you’re curious about where this meme has been.
But, for the moment, here are five reasons that I blog (cross-posted at Joe Dolson):
- I like to write.
I began to write articles during 2005 because I wanted to provide more information about my web design business and what I thought on my website. I also wanted to return to writing — having not written anything more interesting than a set of directions since I graduated from college. The process of writing something is very satisfying to me. Given a choice, I’d quite possibly choose to spend more time writing than doing hands on work with web design, honestly. My blog(s) give me a great outlet.
- I need to refine my thoughts.
In the raw, untamed lands of my brain, my thoughts run wild. Taking pen to paper (or, more accurately, keyboard to screen,) gives me a chance to domesticate my thoughts. I can spend my time writing down an argument in order to clarify, for myself, what it is I think. Sometimes, the results are inconclusive. The interactivity of blogging, however, enables me to gain very useful input from others who read what I wrote and provide their own viewpoints. Every refining detail is incredibly valuable to me.
- I like to ask questions.
It’s significant that a lot of what I write falls into the general category of “why” or “how.” I like to talk about the reasons for performing a task in a particular way — whether this is a question of search marketing, website accessibility, or some other topic I choose for the moment. In day to day practice, I only get to ask myself these questions — and I don’t always have the luxury of time to investigate further. My blogging provides a venue to ask these questions more publically. I don’t know the answers: but I’m absolutely willing to go out on a limb to make some statement, in hopes that others will make their own contributions.
- I work alone.
This is also the reason that I participate in forums — because my day to day work is solitary. I’m self-employed, and spend most of my professional time by myself. Sharing thoughts with co-workers is a valuable habit — having no coworkers, I try to share my thoughts with other members of the same industry. It’s a way of socializing. It may be very much on professional topics, but it enables me to form professional friendships which I would not be able to pursue locked into my home office.
- I like to teach.
Blogging is a good way to share my own knowledge. While being open about the fact that there are many specialists who know far more than I do, blogging gives me a pathway to provide solid information with others. I have no way to particularly guarantee that what I teach is accurate, but I’m far from the first teacher to be uncertain. Teaching helps me learn. All in all, the process of blogging is a very effective learning tool: I learn in the writing, others learn in the reading, then I turn around and learn from my commenters, who, with any luck, learned from writing their comments. Hey, it’s just a big educational orgy.
Who I’m going to tag:
Loren Baker writes today on the damage you can do your site by applying the “nofollow” microformat to your own pages. He breaks it down to one core element: what are you saying if you don’t trust your own pages?
Using nofollow on yourself seems to be one pretty obvious way of sending the wrong signals — it may or may not be directly read as a “bad thing,” but it absolutely suggests something manipulative or untrustworthy about your site.
By using a NoFollow attribute to link to these [about, contact, privacy, etc.] pages, you’re basically telling Google that you do not trust yourself, you are not real, and you do not honor user privacy. Hence, the drop in ranking.
Loren Baker
There are plenty of ways you can leverage search engines. Why make use of a tactic which obviously sends a message of manipulation? It seems pretty straightforward to me: your code should reflect your intentions. Nofollow suggests that you don’t have faith in a page; that you don’t actually WANT to help people find it. If you’re using it to point to your own contact page, you are effectively saying that you don’t WANT to be contacted. (Or maybe you just don’t trust that lousy contact form you’re using?)
You have little chance of making your business a success if you are unwilling to trust yourself. You may not have intended to send that message; but it is definitely one signal which can be picked up from the use of nofollow.
The idea behind using nofollow on your own pages was, I believe, to focus attention on your other pages: your content bearing, keyword rich pages. It’s the myth of “conserving PageRank” — I don’t know where it started, but it’s been talked about many times. This particular idea about nofollow is described by one publication as follows:
The other side of the nofollow tag, is that you can take advantage of it inside your own web sites. Think about all the low value, or no money pages on your site… pages like about us, where to find us, contact us. Every link leaving your home page “bleeds” PageRank to those pages and you’ll want to stop that!
Instead of using normal static hyperlinks you can use nofollow links instead. This lets the “human mouse clicking visitor” find the pages on their own, but totally blocks the search engine from finding them.
So not only can you provide visitors with a rich user experience, you can conserve your PageRank and link popularity within your home page.
“Bleeds PageRank,” eh? Simple point: PageRank doesn’t “leak.” If you link out to a page, that page gains a small portion of your PR — that portion is not, however, subtracted from your page’s rank. Even if PageRank were a meaningful metric, this argument would be patently absurd. (And I’m not getting into that argument right now….)
Every page on your site is important. Do you think that your “About Us” page isn’t significant because it doesn’t have any products listed on it? It’s not a call to action? Well, think again. You’re not just selling your product: you’re also selling trust in your company. People will buy from a company which they think will deliver on their promises. These “no money” pages convey important information to give your potential customers faith in your company. Don’t try and sell them short.