Successful Sites- Issue 012 - Adapting Infomercials and SEO Basics

Free Site Reviews at the SES in NY- Mar.2, 2005

If you are attending SES in NY or happen to live near NY, sign up for the Karcher Group's free site review clinic for practical advice on improving your site. Space is limited, so be sure to register early.

What You Can Learn About SEO Copywriting From Infomercials

One day while working in the kitchen, I was half-listening to the TV in the other room. There was a silly informercial on for a double boiler, something that's been around for centuries. However, this infomercial called it a name like "the Chocolate Dream" and was touting the item as the miracle cure for boring desserts. Although I knew this was a commercial for a simple item I already own, I found myself following along with the pitch.

What's the Problem?

The first order of business was to define the reason why I could not live without this miracle appliance. According to the Chocolate Dream infomercial, my family is falling asleep at the table over their pound cake and turning up their noses in disgust at the cookies being offered to them. Life just has no spark, and everything is dim and grey. Heck, the family isn't groomed and they are badly dressed to boot.

What problems do your customers face? Why do they need your product? Often you either have to create demand or enhance demand for what you sell. By pointing out that you understand their problems, you create trust.

What's the Solution?

Why, the Chocolate Dream, of course! With the Chocolate Dream, the lighting is suddenly warm and glowing, the kids have brushed their hair, and Bubba has put a shirt on over that stained undershirt and suddenly looks a lot like Alec Baldwin. The family looks on in delight as they are served chocolate-dipped strawberries, molded chocolate candy, and they nearly explode with happiness as a chocolate fondue appears at the table. Life is again fun and full of promise.

The benefits are what convince people that your product will solve their problem, even if they weren't really aware they had a problem before that point. Notice that we aren't talking yet about how it works, we are merely setting the stage by showing how the problem is solved by this product. It creates a happy family and prevents what's-for-dessert stress.

Is There More?

Of course, there's more! If you order NOW, not only will you get the Chocolate Dream, but you also get this nifty dipping fork set, a fondue pot, fun candy molds, and SO MUCH MORE. Sure, you can buy a double-boiler at any kitchen appliance place, but you you won't get these great extras!

A unique selling proposition strengthens your position with the client and gives them a reason to buy from you instead of anyone else. It also gives them a reason to keep coming back if your product is a frequent purchase.

If You Place Your Order Now...

If you want the Chocolate Dream, you need to go get your phone NOW and call, because they aren't sure how many more they can sell at this price,and the free gifts will run out soon.

This is a key point that many many pages of website copy miss.. a call to action. You want to let the customer know how to order and encourage them to place the order now, before they browse any competing websites or forget how to find you. It doesn't have to be as blatant or as cheesy as an infomercial, but make sure there are calls to action throughout your copy.

What is a Chocolate Dream? A Chocolate Dream is...

If you listen to an infomercial, you will notice that they never refer to the product as "it".

Many writers today will tell you if your copy isn't natural or in a conversational style that it's poorly written. However, infomercial copywriters know that repetition is the key to branding and product recall, so they repeat the name as often as possible.

If you are writing a conversational style piece, or informational copy, it may not make sense to repeat the product name throughout. However, if you are writing copy to sell or increase relevance with the search engines, think infomercial.

You can definitely go overboard with repetition, but keep relevance, branding, and recall in mind when writing sales copy and be sure to use the relevant phrase throughout.

List the Features

Most websites use their features to sell, completely missing the problem/solution demand; the elements that really sell. While the features need to be in the copy, they don't come first. And the more you show the benefits associated with each feature, the more compelling the copy will be.

Who Needs the Chocolate Dream?

It's obvious that the Chocolate Dream is targeting caucasian, American moms. They show Mom slaving over the oven; later she's shown beaming with joy over being able to please her family and clean up quickly. She can also throw impressive parties!

The target audience is also clear from the channel selection- they've chosen to advertise on daytime TV, children's shows, and women's channels.

Does this mean they are alienating single men, grandmothers, or minority dads? NO. They aren't turning down any orders from anyone, however they are focusing their efforts on the demographic most likely to purchase, increasing the effectiveness of their ads and lowering their overall advertising costs.

What do Infomercials Teach Us About Web Copy?

No need to reinvent the wheel; infomercials sell millions of dollars of products a year. The formula works! It can be easily adapted to your website copy, regardless of whether you sell products or services. So don't delay, start writing today!

Scottie Claiborne is the Web Marketing Strategist for The Karcher Group and the facilitator of the Successful Sites Newsletter. She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and the High Rankings Seminars as well as the administrator of the High Rankings Forum.

High Rankings Web Marketing Seminar- March 31-April 1, 2005

Learn all the aspects of web marketing that you need to know in this 2-day, hands-on seminar that includes practical work on your own site. You won't just learn theories, you'll learn how to implement them with consulting from the experts.
Featuring Jill Whalen, Debra O'Neill Mastaler, Christine Churchill, Karon Thackston, Matt Bailey, Dan Theis, and Scottie Claiborne.

Busting SEO Myths

Spam Techniques That Just Don't Work

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, may seem like some sort of black magic to those who don't understand it. But really, it's something that anyone who spends some time reading and testing, can do pretty easily.

Unfortunately, there's a ton of old information and downright wrong information all over the net on this subject. It's very difficult to figure out the best strategy when you can't even figure out which articles or websites you can trust.

For the most part, if any given strategy has to do with trying to trick the search engines, it's probably a bad technique. Some of these tricks involve keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages and numerous other dubious techniques. Let's go over some of these in more detail so that you can better understand why you shouldn't use them on your site, and what you can do instead.

Keyword Stuffing

Most Webmasters have figured out that to optimize their site, they need to use keywords, but they haven't quite figured out the proper usage for them. In trying to decipher what a search engine might want to see, they assume that if it likes a few instances of a keyword phrase, then using it 50 times would be that much better! Not only that, they think that by putting them in every available spot in the HTML code, their rankings will really soar. So they repeat them tons of times in their Meta keyword tag, in image alt attributes (alt tags), in header text, comment tags and in their first paragraph of copy.

To top it all off, they decide to repeat these keywords even more times at the bottom of the page. They may do this in a font that's the same color as their background, or even place them so low on the page that a person would need to scroll down a mile before ever seeing them.

These aren't "bad" people or anything. They often have no idea that what they're doing is wrong. Most of the time, they assumed this was what they needed to do because they saw the same thing on a competitor's page. They never knew that there was an alternative. What they also didn't know was that their competitors probably ranked well despite their keyword stuffing, not because of it. Removing the junk might even make them rank higher!

Why It's a Bad Strategy

Search engines rank pages by varying formulas that are supposed to figure out which pages are the most relevant for the search at hand. Most of today's engines have what we in the SEO world call "filters." Use any particular keyword or phrase too many times or in too many places, and you'll very likely trip one of the filters designed to catch this. Unfortunately, there's no way to really determine the optimal number of times to mention any given keyword, because it will vary depending on the message you want to get across on your page. One thing is for sure -- if you make your page read poorly, you won't be doing your site any favors. The temporary gain in the engines that you may get until the filter catches up with you, probably won't make up for how silly your page looks to your real visitors.

One of the reasons people stuff keywords all over a page is that they think they have to put every single keyword that might relate to their site, right there on the home page. This is one of the most common misconceptions that people have. Your home page is not the be-all-end-all of your site. It doesn't have to list every product or service imaginable that might relate to it. In fact, if it does it could send up a red flag to the engines that something fishy is going on.

You'd be much smarter to figure out perhaps 3 related phrases that describe what your site is all about, and use these on your home page in a judicious manner. Be sure to put them in your Title tag, as well as visibly in the copy on the page that your site visitors will read. By that I mean to write or rewrite your page copy based on the phrases you choose. Once you do this, it can be extremely powerful for your search engine rankings.

But don't stop there! Make sure to use all those other phrases that you couldn't put on your home page, on different pages of your site. Many people decide to create new pages specifically for this purpose, but I'm a big believer in using the pages you already have. Most likely you will find that this is easier to do than it sounds. Simply go through each page one-by-one and figure out it's general theme and which phrases relate to that theme. Look for instances where you may have used some industry jargon, when a keyword phrase would work just as well. (Be sure to research your keyword phrases with a tool such as Wordtracker so that you are not wasting time on keywords nobody actually searches for.)

Doorway Pages

Those who know better than to stuff their site full of keywords often turn doorway pages to try to achieve high rankings. These are pages added to their site that are designed solely for the search engines, but are not fit for human consumption. Sometimes they put these on their own site, or sometimes, they'll create an entirely new site for their doorway pages. They justify the use of this technique because they believe that the page MUST be crammed with keywords in order to rank well, but they hate the thought of ruining the original look of their pages. These guys and gals may think they're smarter than those who stuff their actual pages, but they're in for the same rude awakening somewhere down the line.

Since doorway pages are one of the oldest tricks in the book, the search engines have long since learned how to spot them and eliminate or penalize them. Often these pages have no links pointing to them anyway, (other than a few well-placed invisible ones), which doesn't give them much chance of ranking highly either. But the biggest reason for not using doorway pages on your site is because when you use them instead of optimizing the real pages of your site, you're not really fixing what is obviously broken. You may not think your site is broken, but if it is not ranking highly for keyword phrases that are relevant to it, then it is indeed broken. By not addressing the real issues, it's like putting a band-aid on a broken bone. It might be easier for you at the moment, but it really doesn't solve your problem.

SEO is Not About Tricks

SEO isn't rocket science; nor is it magic or deception. Like most things, it takes time and/or money for it to be successful. If you hear about some sort of quick-fix method for getting your site found in the engines, you can pretty much bet that it's something the search engines are actively seeking to penalize. Even if you find something that works for awhile, one day when you least expect it, all your rankings may simply vanish into thin air. If you're lucky, you'll find another technique that will work until the next big shakeup; however, you may find that the search engines have had enough of your shenanigans, and your site may get knocked out for good.

Learn the techniques that have withstood the test of time. Do your keyword research, write great copy that includes your important phrases naturally within it, write compelling Title tags that use the same phrases, and provide some linking code for other sites who might want to link to yours. Those links will be the one thing that pushes your site up in the listings after you get on-the-page stuff in tip-top shape.

For more details on creating Title tags and Meta tags, as well as additional SEO strategies that provide a long-term solution, please read my articles here.

Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and editor of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. She is a nationally recognized speaker at various search engine optimization conferences and is the owner of the popular High Rankings Forum

Wrap Up

Yikes, It's Been a While!

So.. how've you been? What have you done to your website lately? Time to take a look at it again, dig in to the stats, and see what needs doing!

I've got lots going on here. Right now, I'm looking out the car window at a gorgeous sunset turning the North Carolina mountains blue and the clouds pink, and thinking I need to plan a camping trip soon! My sister and I are on the way back from a trip to Nashville to settle some family business, and I've got to tell you a road trip with my sister is never dull!

My baby girl turned 3 over the weekend, and it's jarring to realize they are all growing up soooo fast. She made me feel a little better though when she found her baby carrier in the garage and insisted on bringing it inside and sitting in it to watch TV.
"I STILL the baby!" she announced proudly. She is my baby. :-)

High Rankings Seminar -Seattle

We're coming to the West Coast in April, so mark your calendars! The whole gang will be there, along with a new presenter, Dan Thies, Keyword Superfreak. The format has been expanded to include hands-on, small group workshops on day 2 so you'll get valuable one-on-one consulting related to YOUR site. We are all looking forward to it, and hope you can make it too!

Be sure to register early though, because registration is limited to 40 participants to ensure that everyone gets personal attention. We aren't just teaching theories, this seminar is designed to walk you through the process and give you real-world advice and strategies.

NY SES

If you're going to the New York Search Engine Strategies in March, be sure to register for the free site review clinic sponsored by the Karcher Group. We'll be handling one-on-one reviews and giving practical advice on ways to improve your web marketing strategy.

While Matt Bailey and I may be the more visible members of the Karcher team, we will be joined by the rest of the knowledgeable and skilled members of our group including Craig Geis, Scott DeLong, Matt Orcutt, James Golden, Tony Iero, and our fearless leader (and top notch SEO in his own right) Geoff Karcher.

We have a lot of fun, and the group of us cover a wide range of specialties from design and programming to SEO and usability, so stop by, have a snack and a drink, and let us take a look at your site.

You do have to register, so go ahead and register now! It's completely free but we only have so many timeslots available.

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Issue #012- Infomercial Lessons and SEO Basics

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