Improving Conversion Efficiency When Writing For The Web

When teaching seo copywriting, I make the clear distinction between demand analysis and performance analysis.

Demand analysis
Demand analysis is the use of online tools to discover the most popular search terms carried out by searchers by time and geo-location.

Performance analysis
Performance analysis refers to the conversion efficiency of specific keyphrases on our website. In other words, have certain keyphrases engaged visitors and been persuasive enough to convert these visitors into leads, sales or sign-ups etc.

If the words on our website attract users but have a poor conversion effciency, one has to consider modifying them in order to work more efficiently as emotional triggers but without affecting the website’s search rank.

Search words versus “care words”
Performance related words are termed “care words” by Gerry McGovern, CEO of Customer Carewords who says:

“The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website…and give strong clues as to what we want, but only clues.”

So, our every day “language of intent” can differ when searching where we tend to use more mechanical and punctuated terminology.

For example, one might be looking for a last minute holiday to Venice but the search term used might be “flight deals to Venice”.

However upon arriving at a website, is the searcher more likely to purchase the holiday if it was termed “holiday offers to Venice” rather than “flight deals to Venice”?

So, clearly understanding how people search and subsequently convert is extremely significant if we are serious about writing search optimised and persuasive copy for the web.

Measuring keyword performance
My advice is to follow your web analytics reports closely. Assess your keyword performance by bounce rate, average time spent on site, average pages per visit and of course the all important conversion rate.

These metrics will give you a good indication as to whether you have sufficiently engaged your visitors in order to persuade them to convert. Remember, getting the searcher to your website is only half the story!