The copy in your small business website enables your prospective customers to hear your voice, to understand your differentiation and to appreciate your value. Therefore, to maximize the sales that your website generates for your business, you need to continually optimize the site copy.
But how to easily do this??
The following are three highly effective ways to refine your website copy on a continual basis to help you drive more leads, customers and sales:
- Test!
Try changing one element on a web page for a period of time, and then check the results in your web analytics and sales data. This is an easy way for you to implement web page copy testing. For example, try changing the specific language you use in your “order” button, or the heading on one of your product/service pages, or the Call to Action on your home page.The important thing here is to make one noticeable change on the page, but leave the rest of the page untouched. You also need to make sure that you leave the change in place long enough to collect a sufficient data set to make an informed decision.
- Collect Customer & Prospect Feedback
Another great way to refine your website copy is to conduct a controlled study with a select number of existing customers as well as prospective clients. Present the group with a few variations of targeted web pages. Keep the study simple and focused, as the more complexity you add the more difficult it will be for your participants to provide concrete feedback. For example, you may have them review two potential variations of a Valentine’s Day promotion on your home page, or you may have them critique two potential variations of the language you use through the checkout process on your site, etc. - Leverage Paid Search
You can actually use Paid Search vehicles such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing as testing platforms. These programs make it easy for you to setup A/B split tests, which deliver two distinct web pages (in rotation) to the searcher for the same keyword search. As you collect the data, you’ll easily see which web page performs better and then you can roll out such page to your actual website.Another, more advanced form of web page testing is Google Website Optimizer. This takes web page testing to an entirely new level, in which you can concurrently test multiple elements on the same web page, whether the header, messaging, text length, Call to Action, etc. (You can also go well beyond web copy testing and test your images, color, layout, etc.) All of these web page testing options are “free,” as long as you have a Paid Search account. (Of course you will need to pay for the clicks you receive during the Paid Search campaign.)
What’s important to keep in mind is that you should always be testing your website copy. Whether you use the tactics presented above or try something completely different, the point is that your website is an excellent platform for you to test, track, learn and then make corresponding improvements to drive your sales growth.
