Content marketing is hot. There has been a lot written about it in recent years and honestly, content is extremely important. Besides images, videos, and such, the core of content is text. It has undoubtedly been told to you as a webshop owner or employee of a webshop company about the importance of text. In this beginner's article, you will read what you need to think about to write good texts for your webshop.
It takes quite some time, but it is definitely worth the investment to write good texts. Not only does text influence the conversion rate, but it also affects the positions of your pages in the unpaid search results of search engines. With text, you attract visitors to your webshop, and with text, you help them convert. So let’s get started!
Valuable for visitors AND well organized for search engines
When writing a text, keep in mind that the text is valuable for the visitor. Additionally, the text needs to be well organized for search engines. Text appears in various places in your webshop, such as on the homepage, category pages, and product pages. Although the content and length of the text on these pages will differ greatly, the general step-by-step plan below can be applied to all pages.
Step-by-step plan
Go through the following five steps to arrive at a good text. Always ensure that you write unique texts to avoid duplicate content.
Step 1: Know your audience
The demographic data of your audience, which you can extract from Google Analytics for example, does not tell you everything about your audience. If you really want to write for your audience, you need to know (a lot) more. What are they interested in? What are their views on life? What do they love and what do they enjoy reading? Get to know your audience (if you don’t already) and think about which writing style best resonates with this audience. You may choose to write somewhat more informally on your blog than on the other pages of your webshop.
Step 2: Write in benefits for the visitor
Why would someone make a purchase from you? And why that particular product? These are questions you need to ask yourself to highlight the benefits for the visitor. You can then incorporate these benefits into the text. Below is an example of how you could do this on a product page.
Product page
Although (potential) customers will compare products based on features, they are primarily interested in the benefits of your product. The features are merely a means to achieve the benefits. First, list all the features of the product and translate these into concrete benefits. See the example below for a Samsung smartphone model x.
Have you also created a list of benefits? Then you can incorporate these excellently into the text on the product page. You can also write in benefits for the visitor on other pages than product pages, while also encouraging action. In doing so, you can repeatedly highlight your unique selling points (USPs).
Step 3: Make it scannable
Research has shown that people only read 20 to 28 percent of the words on a page. Therefore, make sure you write text that is easily scannable.
Use a clear heading and subheadings to break the text into paragraphs;
Ensure a clear font and font size;
Use bullet points to highlight the most important points;
Emphasize important words or phrases by making the text bold, italic, or underlined;
Create sufficient white space;
Add visual content (photos and videos). People can process images very quickly.
Step 4: Rewrite the text
After an initial draft, in which you have written in the right tone for the audience, emphasized the benefits for this audience, and shaped it into a scannable whole, you rewrite the text. No text is perfect on the first try, so rewrite the text to improve readability. Also, ask yourself if you have sufficiently convinced your audience to achieve the desired action (which is usually a purchase, but could also be a contact moment, for example).
Step 5: Optimize the text/page for search engines
Not without reason do you think of search engines only at the last step. You will notice that writing text goes much faster when you are not focused on the repeated use of a keyword in the text. Moreover, when you write for a certain category or a specific product, you often automatically use the right keyword. However, it is wise to run through a number of things to ensure that your text is truly well organized for search engines.
On-page factors
Use the keyword planner in Google AdWords to research the search volume for keywords related to your text. Ensure that the main keyword (or keyword combination) is included in the title of the page (preferably at the front), the URL, the meta description, the headings, and in the text. If possible, you can also include the keyword in the description and in the alt tag of images on the page. Because search engines are increasingly recognizing relationships between keywords and synonyms, it is advisable to write in concepts, where you include related keywords together.
Length and position of the text
The length and position of the text are also important. Text at the top of the page holds more value for search engines than at the bottom of the page. As a rule of thumb for each page: the more text, the better. However, it is important that the page remains user-friendly. You also don’t want important information pushed down the page. On a category page, you can choose to work with a text block above the products and a text block below the products. This way, you can fit enough text in and avoid products not standing out.
Of course, it is important that your page is well found in search engines, but always take your audience as the starting point when writing and optimizing your texts.
Source: http://twinklemagazine.nl/
