I’m not saying you should stuff your pages with keywords. Never! All I’m saying is that you should not waste valuable website space on meaningless words. Focus on words your customers can relate to and words that you just might rank for in the search engines. 

Consider this: Do you think your potential customers use the words “groundbreaking” or “innovative” when they search online? Probably not. Take a moment now and go to Google.com. Enter “groundbreaking” in the search box. Bet you didn’t plan to reading about funeral ceremonies today. See what I’m trying to say?

What You Should Do – A Fictional Book Author Case Study

Let’s say you are an author of a dog obedience book and you’ve filled your home page with all kinds of mumbo jumbo on your latest awards, your dog training expertise, etc. Here are three things I’d recommend to revise that jargon-laden home page.

1. Change the headline on your home page from “Award-Winning Author Brings You Mastering Fighto” to “Mastering Fighto Shows You How to Train the Perfect Beagle.”

2. The first paragraph on your home page references your years of experience. This is important information, but it doesn’t appeal to the reader’s problem. Tell us that you specialize in operant conditioning and have a stronghold on adaptive conditioning in your bio and not on your home page. Change your home page so that the first two paragraphs explain how your book will solve their problems. Here’s what I would write:

You no longer have to wonder why Fighto munches on the floor moldings when you leave the house. I’ll tell you in the first chapter why your beagle has separation anxiety, and I’ll tell you how to fix it.

Stop pulling on that leash when your beagle sniffs the neighbor’s grass. By the end of this book you’ll see how to engage your beagle’s intuitive senses without losing your mind.

3. Read through your web content to remove adjectives and replace them with active verbs. You should also review my list of seven generic statements and remove those from your website content, too.

Removing jargon and industry terminology leaves more room for commonly searched keywords and context, both of which will help your search engine ranking. Say goodbye to jargon and hello to better website content!

In this second post in my series of posts on how to avoid industry jargon on your website, I’m assigning you a task. Delete the following generic statements from your website content.

1. Company dedicated to quality.

2. We are the best in the industry.

3. Services tailored to your needs.

4. Innovative solutions for your business (or home, car, office, etc.).

5. We provide the tools.

6. Competitive edge over the others.

7. Our representatives offer attentive customer service. (Shouldn’t this go without saying?)

Instead of making generic statements such as these, why not back up your claims of awesomeness with direct statements, data, a legit guarantee, and testimonials.

Direct Statements

Avoid jargon at all costs! Say exactly what you mean. Think power words (active verbs and nouns).

Data

Don’t say, “Customers love us.”

Look at your sales data for information that you can use to back up your claims. Can you see that fewer than 5% of customers return your gadget? If so, say this instead, “95% customer satisfaction.”

Guarantee

Don’t say this: “We promise you’ll love us.”

Do say this: “We guarantee your satisfaction. If after 30 days you don’t like our product, call us for a full refund.”

Don’t worry about everyone taking advantage of your guarantee. You might lose out on a few sales, but if your product or service is as good as you claim, then you’ll get more sales than you lose. Customers who are on the fence about your product/service need a reason to trust you. A guarantee helps build that trust.

Testimonials

Testimonials on your website build consumer trust, too. Ask happy clients for a sentence or two of feedback. Add those nuggets to a testimonials or clients page on your website.

*********

Join me in the Campaign Against Industry Jargon. What other statements do you think should be deleted from website content?

In the next several posts I’ll be talking about how industry jargon and buzzwords bring down your website and your marketing efforts. First up, let’s talk about what it all means.

According to Descriptionary, a Thematic Dictionary by Marc McCutcheon, jargon is “meaningless gibberish; the special language of a class, profession, or a group.”

Examples of jargon include:

• Cutting edge
• Innovative
• Industry leading
• Sought after
• Dynamic
• Touch point
• Ground breaking
• Spearhead
• Leverage
• Thinking out of the box
• Action items
• Core competencies

Let’s try using a couple in a sentence to prove my point.

XYZ Company introduces its groundbreaking software that far surpasses the innovation of its competitors.

Let’s rewrite the sentence using “sexy.”

XYZ Company introduces its sexy software that far surpasses the sexiness of its competitors.

You can see in both of these examples that we really haven’t said anything important. Our sentence needs to inform not slather the page in gooey, meaningless words. Considering we only have six seconds to catch our reader’s attention, we better get to re-writing.

This is how I would do it:

XYX Company offers an accounting software that far surpasses the accounts receivable tracking features of competing software.

*******

Tune in next week to learn how industry jargon hurts your search engine optimization efforts, online and offline sales, and your sanity. Oh, and if you want to join the Campaign Against Industry Jargon, leave a comment and tell us about your most hated jargon.

Download your Guide to Social Media Planning from my writing freebies page.

Because we’ve realized how much fun beagles and other hounds can be, we’ve decided to offer specially priced marketing and website content writing services to hound rescue organizations through something called Project Hound Marketing. Please help us spread the word!

Fifth, decide who and for how much time

Maybe you are the person who spends 30 minutes every morning on social media or maybe you have several people in the office responsible for monitoring your social media accounts every day, all day. Whatever the case, keep it consistent. An abandoned Facebook fan page will have the opposite impact you are looking for.

When deciding on time allowances, consider the realistic impact you could have on each social network. If your objective is to provide customer service to customers who hang out on Facebook and StumbleUpon, spend more time where you have more influence. With Facebook you can provide links, ask questions, and respond to feedback easily whereas with StumbleUpon the impact is not as direct. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on StumbleUpon, it just means you should limit your time there.

Sixth, create an editorial calendar

It’s time to decide what kind of information you should publish in order to reach your objective. If it’s customer service you’re after, then you should answer frequently asked questions, provide links to resource articles, and invite customers to take surveys on performance, for example.

Your editorial calendar doesn’t need to cover every little detail, but it does need to outline the type of content you will publish over the next 30 days. Keep in mind that 75% of the material you bookmark and post should be non-promotional, questions and answers, and general interaction between followers while 25% of material can be promotional.

Seventh, create your social media accounts and keep them personable

It’s tempting to open a social media account and use your corporate speak to fill in all those fields “about you.” Social media is not the place to overload on marketing speak. Instead, keep it conversational and add your name and pictures/videos where it’s appropriate.

Eighth, listen and respond

Successful social media interaction doesn’t result from 100% automation. To have success, you need to listen to what your customers say and respond! Use Google Alerts and other listening tools to hear what people say about your business.

Ninth, build your connections

It’s very easy to start connecting with people in your industry or celebrities or local news, and that’s okay to do, but it doesn’t help reach your objective of providing customer service. Focus on your customers—the rest is just butter.

Tenth, revisit your social plan and empty the next bucket

After a month has gone by, assess your work. Are you making progress toward reaching that objective? If not, try changing up your editorial calendar and the frequency/timing of your participation.

If you have made progress toward reaching that first objective, then look at your next bucket and repeat the process. Of course, much of the ground work is already done, so it’s just a matter of modifying details to empty the subsequent buckets.

Do you have a social media marketing plan?

First, decide on your goal. Think about your mission statement. What is the one thing your business hopes to accomplish? Take that idea and pull it into social media. For instance, I want to help small businesses create killer web content. Using social media, I connect with small business owners to offer marketing ideas and my services.

Second, determine your objectives. This is the moment where you determine the concrete results you hope to achieve. For example

•    Boost in website traffic
•    Search engine optimization
•    Higher sales
•    More media mentions
•    Build credibility in your industry (e.g., number of followers on Twitter, number of guest blog posts accepted, number of referrals, etc.)
•    Provide another avenue for customer service
•    Keep in touch with customers and potential customers
•    Simply have access to news and information

It’s not enough to make a blanket statement such as, “I want more website traffic.” A better objective reads, “I want 10% more website traffic.” Attach a number to an objective whenever you can.

Third, prioritize the objectives. Now that you have a list of objectives you want to accomplish, put them in order of importance. You should not try to be all things all at once. Instead, create a plan that includes a series of strategy phases.

The first strategy phase, or bucket as I like to call it, will help you reach your immediate objective, e.g., provide avenue for customer service. Anything that won’t help you reach your customers should be added to a subsequent strategy phase a/k/a bucket.

Fourth, identify where your customers hang out. If you don’t know where your customers hang out within social media, ask them, pay to have market research completed, or research online. Here are a couple tools to review:

1. Social Media Demographics via Flowtown
2. Go to Quantcast and enter the URL for every social media site you think relevant

Once you know where your customers spend 80% of their time within social media, establish your presence on those sites. For the sake of this series of posts, let’s say your customers choose Facebook primarily and StumbleUpon secondarily.

In the next post, I’ll talk about additional social media planning steps.

You can’t find the expiration date on your web content, because it’s not there. However, there are a few ways to look at web content and decide on when it should be updated. But that’s probably not what you want to hear. You want to hear a concrete answer on web content expiry. I get that.

So before I get into the long “it depends” conversation, let me give you the short answer. Small businesses should revise there web content at least once a year.

That’s just the minimum effort. Now for the long answer.

Update Your Site Regularly and Keep the Search Engines Happy

A stale site could lose its search engine ranking.  It’s for this reason that blogs prove helpful for keeping a website in a search engine’s favor. If you don’t have the resources to blog, then make it a priority to add new content to your site every three to four months.

Do You Cringe When You Read Your Web Content?

Let’s say you wrote the content for your business a couple months before you took the first client. Now that you have a few months under your belt it’s likely your business has morphed into something different than you originally planned. Take time every two months to review a page of content. Does it represent your business correctly?

Review Your Bounce Rate

In a recent blog post I talked about how Google Analytics can help improve your web content and explained how a poor “bounce rate” (how quickly a visitor leaves your site) indicates a need to revise your web content. If your visitors don’t stay on your site long enough to learn what you do, then chances are your website content bores them. Hence, you need to revise those pages right away.

The Phone Doesn’t Ring

If your website does not motivate potential customers to call you, then rewrite your web content. Websites do function as online business cards, but they should also function as sales tools. If the phone isn’t ringing, continue to revise your web content until it does.

Stay Current

Up-to-date copyright dates on the bottom of each web page, links to recent media mentions, and case studies written in the past year each prove to your visitors that your business is an active one. Staying current helps to build trust with the consumer.

Tell me. Is your website content expired?

If that’s your case, start out with the 10 questions below and update the FAQs when appropriate.

But before you do anything, you first need to understand the purpose of an FAQ page, which is three parts: 1) Save your breath by not answering the same question over and over again; 2) Build trust with the consumer; and 3) Overcome objections your ideal client may have.

10 Questions to Include on Your FAQ Page

1. What does COMPANY NAME do exactly?

2. Where does the name for your company originate?

3. Where is COMPANY NAME located?

4. Who do I talk to if I have a problem or question?

5. How much do PRODUCTS/SERVICES cost?

6. Do you ever offer sales or discounts?

7. How long will it take to get my PRODUCT/SERVICE?

8. Does COMPANY NAME have a refund or return policy?

9. Where can I find customer reviews or testimonials?

10. What is the COMPANY NAME privacy policy?

Good. Turns out the following five errors may not ruin your business, but they certainly won’t help your business or your brand. I suggest read close and then head to your site to make improvements.

1. Broken links

Before publishing a page or a post on your site, always test the links to make sure they work. Additionally, run a link check on your site every month. I rely on the Xenu’s Link Sleuth to tell me about my broken links. Broken links can hurt your SEO ranking and create a poor user experience.

2. Stale passwords

You know that websites get hacked, I don’t need to tell you that. But we all need a reminder to change our passwords. Consider this your friendly reminder.

3. Busted contact forms

On a couple of occasions the contact forms on my site stopped working, and I had no clue. Test your contact forms regularly to make sure you don’t miss a single client communication.

4. Hidden contact information

Speaking of contact forms, make the path to your contact information available from the home page and from every other page on your site. How can someone hire you if they don’t know how to reach you?

5. Repetitive information

Don’t repeat information on your site. Tell your story in as few words as possible, and lead the reader to a clear call to action. It’s aggravating to land on a site and have no idea what you should do next. If you aren’t sure that all the pages on your site count, pay for usability testing. I recommend UserTesting.com.