Did you know the average conversion rate on a landing page is between about 2.2% and 2.5%? Given that, the odds of converting a prospect to a customer are not very high.

But if you incorporate some of the tips outlined below, you’ll be able to improve your landing page conversions by 10% to 50%. Imaging that — increasing your revenue on each landing page by 10% to 50% by simply fine-tuning your website copy.

Read on:

Focus on what the buyer wants, not what they need. Consumers listen to their cravings and desires far more than they pay attention to their needs. Have you ever gone into a grocery store and left with nothing that you planned on getting in the first place? Buyers are impulsive purchasers. When you tap into humans’ natural tendency to be impulsive, you can increase conversions on your website (and at the point-of-purchase).

Before you write a word of copy, you should get inside the mind of your consumer and find out what their hidden motivators are.

Identify your target market’s hidden motivators. Your website has an end purpose to drive consumers to action whether that is to buy a product, join an organization, or donate money. By analyzing your customer’s hidden motivators, you can ask the all important question — what drives them to action? For example, people don’t buy Rolex watches because they tell time accurately. They buy Rolex watches because they want to look sophisticated and wealthy. That’s their hidden motivator. (Why do we say it’s hidden? Because if you ask Rolex owners why they bought their watch, they would never say “Because I want to look sophisticated and wealthy.”)

The aesthetics of your copy can be just as important as the wording. The fastest-selling websites consist of a one-page sales letter with a single column of text occupying half the screen width and a maximum of 2 or 3 linked pages. The paragraphs should be kept short to make the page easier to read. Emphasizing certain keywords by bolding or highlighting can also be useful by drawing your reader’s attention to your benefits.

“Test everything…assume nothing!” There is always room for improvement, so you should test, test, and test some more. It is the only way you can point out your strengths and weaknesses, what works and what doesn’t. No matter how much you research and plan the strategy, you can never know for sure what the outcome will be. Remember that practice makes perfect and lucky for you, copy on the internet is always tweakable.

Many ads today include a URL, leading the potential customers to a landing page in hopes that they will take some kind of action. They may ask for more information, sign up for the newsletter, or make a purchase. By improving the sales copy, you can lead the consumer to make a move.

The take away:

Attention: Grab the buyer’s attention with your headline copy

Interest: Know the target you are addressing so you can capture their interest

Desire: Take advantage of your customer’s wants and desires

Action: Lead the customer to the action you want them to take

If you are eager for more tips on improving your copy, check out this article from Moving Ahead Communications.

Brittney Leigh Smith is a marketing analyst and contributing writer for the 60 Second Marketer.

People frequently overlook the content on the pages of their own websites – and it’s easy to do. Unless you’re constantly updating your products or overhauling your services, once the landing pages are up, they’re quickly forgotten about. But when you rely solely on the words on the page to turn browsers into buyers, you should be spending a decent amount of time evaluating, tweaking and then re-evaluating your content. Think of your web copy as a member of your sales team, and make sure it’s working as hard for you as any of your other employees.

Take a look at your current pages and ask yourself a few questions:

1. Do they properly describe the products and services you offer, highlighting the unique features and benefits of each (all while staying true to your brand)?
2. Do they have distinct calls to action (that don’t sound cheesy)?
3. Is there enough content on the page so that Google will notice it for the right search terms (without seeming “keyword-stuffed” to human eyes)?
4. If a complete stranger saw your page, do you think they’d trust your site enough to make a purchase or follow up for more info (would you give your credit card info to a website like yours)?

If the answer to any of these questions is “negative, Ghostrider,” it’s time to reconsider your content. You can hire a pro or, if you’re looking to save some money, you can do it yourself. Whatever you do, you should have your final pages edited by somebody who has experience with web copywriting.

It's important to write copy that draws the reader in. But it's even more important to write copy that converts prospects into customers. Here are some tips and techniques you can use for your own website or landing page.

Writing is a lot like singing: everyone thinks they can do it. You don’t want your landing pages to look like the written equivalent of a bad American Idol audition, and that’s why it’s important to have a web content specialist take a look at your finished copy. This option gives you extra control of your message, and it costs about a third of what you’d pay for a pro to write it from scratch.

The Pre-Writing Process

If you’re going the DIY route, there are a couple of things to consider before you start writing. First, make sure your foundation is solid by double-checking that the back end of your website is properly optimized for search engines. If a keyword had high search volume and low competition three months ago, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should still be targeting that keyword today. So get your keyword research on. It’s time well spent.

The other thing to consider is the amount of content you’re putting on each page. Most people agree that 250 words (about a half page) is a good start, but if you really want to catch Google’s eye you should hit 650 or more. Is that reasonable for all pages of content? Not always. So use your best judgment, and if you find that it’s possible to use more words without overcrowding the page or looking like you have too much time on your hands, go for it.

The Content Itself

There are several tricks you can rely on to ensure that your content will be, at the very least, above average. Hey, even if it’s not perfect, chances are it’ll still be better than your competition’s. And speaking of competition, looking at your competitors’ websites is a great way to get ideas about what to emulate, as well as what not to do.

In general, you’ll never go wrong if you:

1. Hook ‘em from the beginning. An attention-grabbing first sentence or headline guarantees that the next line gets read. Once the reader is halfway through sentence two, they might as well finish the paragraph. Unexpected statistics, cultural references and scenarios are a great way to accomplish this goal.
2. Create a problem. Then, solve it with your products or services. In some cases, this may be a problem your potential customer or client doesn’t even know they have. For instance, were you questioning your web content before you read this post? I don’t know if you realized it or not, but my company writes web content!
3. Watch QVC. If you want to see sales pros in action, watch QVC. Those hosts don’t just sell gaudy holiday sweaters to old ladies, after all. They run a 26.2-mile word marathon on a daily basis, and they can teach you a thing or two about writing copy that is engaging and that converts. When you’re faced with writing fifty 250+ word pages of unique content, it’s easy to run out of things to say. The QVC hosts never do. They talk about the same product for five minutes at a time, nonstop – and yet it never sounds desperate or overly salesy. Listen to how they present products and companies and try to incorporate similar styles and ideas into your content. If it works for Quacker Factory it’ll work for you.
4. Keep your tone readable and consistent. There’s a reason people read the copy of a Groupon and ignore a terms of service agreement. Groupon has a great tone that’s enjoyable to read, and terms of service agreements are boring legalese. You don’t have to be out-there wild and witty to produce content that people actually want to read. You just have to be interesting.
5. Put a call to action on every page. Many of the product and service pages that you’ll find on the Internet don’t contain enough of them, but calls to action are important, and you’ve got to have them. Incentives are sort of like built-in calls to action, so throw them around liberally. “Order today, and we’ll split the cost of shipping with you.” Better yet, offer to ship it free. Remember, using the same line over and over again is cheating, and it’s annoyingly redundant when you’re browsing through multiple pages of content. It’s important to vary your verbiage.

But Wait! There’s More!

Just because your web copy is written and posted to your site, that doesn’t mean your work is done. Make sure that each page links to at least one other page on your site, preferably using SEO-charged anchor text.

And the last step? It’s a simple one: don’t forget about your new content. Tweet links to your new content-rich pages on occasion, then post a notice on Facebook too. Watch your Google analytics to see what your time-on-site and conversion rates look like. If these numbers are not where you want them to be, make adjustments until they are. After all, it’s an art, this stuff. Musicians have their overdub buttons, sketch artists have their erasers, and an artist isn’t happy until the work is done. Web writers? You’ve got your delete key and, sometimes, you’ve got a better idea.

Kari DePhillips is the owner of The Content Factory, an online PR company that specializes in web content writing and social media management. Give her a shoutout on Twitter @ContentFac.

If you’re looking for some good ideas regarding your public relations efforts, you might check out the white paper section on the Vocus website. They have a number of good white papers that highlight some key things all marketers should know about PR.

In one of their white papers, they covered some basic SEO tips which we thought we’d share with our readers. For the complete white paper, be sure to visit the Vocus website.

Basic SEO Tips

Keywords: Headlines should contain keywords related to major themes in your news.  The headline is not only extremely important for SEO but is also your first opportunity to engage your consumer and will generate the title tag of your release.  Additional keywords should be strategically placed in the release to create rich content that is easily retrievable.

Enhanced URL:  Search engines look at the keywords used in a hyperlink to a website to determine its ranking.  If a hyperlink has keywords included and points to your website, then when a person does a search for those keywords, they are going to be more likely to find you among their results.

Anchor Text/Embedded Keywords: Embedding hyperlinks into your release is another way to increase your ranking and drive traffic to your website.  However, hyperlinks should not exceed one for every 100 words of content.

Multimedia Content: Adding a news image, video or audio to your release will not only make your press release more consumable, graphically pleasing and likely to be read, but it will also ensure your news is indexed in image search engines and create more visibility for your message.