Your ads, landing pages, and website are tools that enable you to sell online. But what really attracts your target audience to interact with your platform is your content and your choice of words. Copywriting leads to lucrative results by communicating your value proposition with actionable words.
Content marketing aims to create high quality content that organically engages leads and adds value to your site and reader. You strengthen your content strategy with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that propel your content to the top of search results and drive traffic to your site.
This blog is the second in a two-part series. In the first part, we looked at how to write content to attract leads from an SEO perspective. We offered specific tips for writing content that ranks high in search results and for attracting leads with high-quality content.
Here, we discuss how your target audience is moving from passively viewing your content to converting or the next step that benefits your business. How does your website traffic turn into new leads and customers for your business?
One way is conversion copywriting – a proactive approach to writing copy that motivates your target audience to engage with you. The main ingredient when writing converting content is a loud and clear call to action (CTA) in ads, landing pages, and web pages.
Copywriters also write for traditional marketing formats like print ads and product labels, but you can’t quantify the results of these offline strategies. The data analytics and conversion tracking capabilities of today’s digital world are unmatched.
SEO content writing versus copywriting
SEO content writing aims to get your site high on search engine result pages (SERPs) and drive traffic to your site. SEO content types are mostly educational and fit what your audience is naturally looking for (organic traffic): blogs, articles, ebooks, and white papers.
The main goal of SEO content writing is to create value-added web content that ranks for:
- Using keywords or search terms of your target audience on your blogs
- Mastering Google’s guidelines for writing high quality content
- Optimal structure of your blog for indexing or adding to the collection of pages on the Internet
Copywriting is the use of words and phrases to drive the desired action (conversion) that you want your audience to take. Copywriting is what convinces your audience to engage with you using proven techniques that generate more interactions and conversions.
The main purpose of copywriting is to write headlines and body copy for sales-oriented strategies, usually:
- Product and service pages
- Ad titles and descriptions
- Landing page content
In short, SEO content attracts your target audience to your website, while a web copy is created to sell to your online audience. SEO content writing involves writing web content like blogs, while copywriters write web copies like ad titles.
You may have come across the term SEO copywriting and wondered how it differs from writing content for SEO. The answer is that there is no clear comparison because “SEO copywriting” is ambiguous.
Experts say the term originated from people confusing “content writing” and “copywriting”. It is also used on the web (even by SEO professionals) because it is a high traffic keyword and a widely used search term.
We want to be clear: content writing and copywriting are not the same thing, so content writing for SEO and copywriting for SEO are not interchangeable.
While it’s not ideal to use the two terms synonymously, it’s not that the idea behind “SEO copywriting” doesn’t exist – you can write sales-oriented copy and still optimize it to rank high on the SERPs. …
For example, a website copy is text that you find on your home page, About Us page, and product and service pages. You really need to optimize these pages for search, but your main goal with these pages is to market your brand. That’s what website copywriting does.
You hire an SEO content writer to increase your page rank, and you hire a copywriter to increase sales – but we can say that these are two sides of the same coin, and it all comes down to the main purpose of what you write.
What is conversion copywriting?
To learn how to write converting content, you need to fully understand conversions.
Conversion is when you successfully provoke the desired action from your target audience. Conversions happen when your target audience takes a step that brings you closer to your ultimate goal – a sale for a retail brand or a new lead for a B2B company.
Some of the more common conversion goals are:
✓ Completing an online purchase
✓ Submitting a contact form
✓ Sign up for a consultation
Here are five examples of digital copywriting projects that resonate directly with your target audience:
1. Social media and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
2. Landing pages (pages with the highest conversions)
3. Copywriting of websites (product and service pages)
4. Titles and descriptions for e-commerce product listings.
5. E-campaigns and newsletters
If copywriting is all about convincing copying, conversion copywriting is about using a deliberate data-driven technique to improve your copy and increase conversions. This means that you will not stop at writing compelling copy for your landing pages – you will constantly be looking for ways to get the most profitable results.
Your foundation for better results is data and insights. Here’s the most important thing you need to know about copywriting conversions: There are advanced conversion tracking tools, unique to the digital realm, that collect data and help you pinpoint the points for improving your content.
Let’s take a closer look at what conversion tracking is and why it’s so important to improve your copy.
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Content Writing Strategy that Converts
Covering the basics of conversion copywriting will help your business stay ahead of the competition. Writing transformative content is an ongoing game of persuasion – your approach will be different for different audiences, copywriting goals and formats. But there is a set of tricks to help you get on the right track.
Here are 5 expert web copywriting tips to turn your passive audience into paying customers:
1. Write compelling headlines
Eight out of 10 people will read your headline, but only two out of 10 will continue to read your content or whatever else you want to say. With a weak headline, you lose a potential customer even before your content can work wonders.
Highlighting the obvious benefits is one of the best ways to grab the attention of your audience. The best headlines capture the essence of your content, are on average seven words (or less) and are straightforward to the point.
2. Write a crystal clear call to action.
When writing converting content, your goal is to generate as many conversions as possible. If you don’t explicitly state the desired action, your audience will be wondering why they came to this page.
Your CTA should be visible and unmistakable at every step of your digital marketing strategy – in the form of text and buttons within and around your website text, ads, and landing pages. A good call to action is action oriented, such as “Sign up for a free trial” or “Request a demo”.
3. Leverage the power of landing pages
Because it is difficult for an ad to wrap your entire message, landing pages serve as an extension of your ad. Landing pages give the reader more context for the ads they clicked on and give you complete control over what you want your target audience to see and know.
Some advanced landing page conversion techniques are to keep an important piece at the top of the page (the top of your content was visible before it was clipped by the browser window), including a countdown timer to highlight limited or exclusive ads, and the use of simple suggestions like a free trial.
4. Include Reasons to Believe (RTB)
Use all the trust factors to build trust in your brand. Include RTB such as happy customer testimonials, key metrics from your past customers, and recognitions received in your content to position yourself as an industry leader.
Specific ways to include RTB in your copy are highlighting quotes or data from expert sources, displaying positive customer reviews, and adding badges to showcase certifications, partnerships, and awards your company has received.
5. A / B test your web copy.
A / B testing is the simplest method of maximizing your data to predict which version of your copy and content will perform best. The key to a successful A / B test is to make both versions as similar as possible – except for the element you are testing.
For example, to A / B test an ad, you must test two different headlines for the same ad to see which one suits your potential customers best (based on the test segment) and find the “winner.” The smarter approach is to create more top performing ads and continually A / B test landing page elements for a robust pay-per-click marketing strategy.
Here’s a general tip for how best to increase conversions: Use proven CRO techniques in all aspects of your digital strategy. Evaluate the performance of your campaign and find all possible ways to improve your conversion rate with A / B tests for all your marketing campaigns.
Some CRO techniques include verifying that your site’s speed is decent (slow loading easily distracts customers), your contact forms are free of unnecessary fields, and conducting a content and CRO audit to eliminate friction across all of your customer touchpoints.
Don’t forget – the success of your content copywriting and conversion efforts is largely based on your ideal understanding of your target audience. With the help of web copying experts and professional copywriting services, you benefit from years of experience in audience analysis and conversion copywriting.