The growth of Liberty Marketing over the past few months has been so dramatic that we have brought in another new member of staff. The latest recruit is Nathan Jeans, whose primary responsibilities will be SEO copywriting, article creation and press release distribution.

With a business and marketing degree and a postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism to his name, Nathan promises to have an interesting mixture of skills that will really benefit Liberty and its clients. Having worked most recently as a freelance writer, Nathan has produced articles for The Guardian and The National Geographic, as well as countless articles for numerous sport magazines, where football, cricket and darts were particularly well received. When not working, Nathan particularly enjoys partaking in the afore mentioned sports, with the exception of cricket, where apparently his technique lets him down!

Managing director, Gareth Morgan commented, “We are delighted to have Nathan onboard. I have worked with dozens of external copywriters over the past few years, but it’s great to actually have someone in-house who can get to know the ins and outs of the company and our clients, and produce copy that represents the ethos and professionalism we have here at Liberty. I have had a good look at his past work and am very impressed by its creative and personable nature. I really do see a lot of good things ahead for the future.”

Many of these tips may seem obvious but it is surprising how many new clients we take on haven’t considered any of them. Have a quick run through these to see a few of the basic ways of turning curious website visitors into customers.

1. Highlight relevance

A visitor will disappear within seconds if they don’t see evidence that they’ve discovered what they are looking for. Make it obvious that you can help them. Add titles and sub-titles that describe and sell your business (remember to also include keywords) and make sure you include images that show your products or illustrate your services. Could you also add a brief bullet-point list of why you are the only supplier they should consider?

2. Build trust

The internet is filled with tricksters, so people are weary of dealing with new names. Remove any anxiety by showing what a reputable business you run. Place testimonials around the site to highlight that you have done a good job for people in the past and use your “About Us” page to give a little background info on your business and to re-affirm your main messages. If you can paint the picture that dealing with your business is completely hassle-free then visitors will not feel a strong need to check out your competitors.

3. Tell them what to do next

Surprisingly, something vitally important but often lacking from the copy on a web page is a Call to Action, i.e. an instruction of how to proceed. People are used to these and without them your conversion rates will always be low. Remind visitors at the end of your sales message that you want them to “Call now” or “”Enquire here” and in doing so, they will. If you can add some urgency, like “Free trial to the first 10 people to call this number” then it’s even more influential.

4. Answer questions before they are asked

Visitors have lots of questions buzzing around their head and if your site doesn’t answer them then they’ll bounce off to find one that does. “Can this product solve my problem?”, “How long does delivery take?”, “What happens if something goes wrong?”, etc.  Pre-empt these questions by building them into your website copy and by creating an FAQ section that sales pages point to. This is also a good way of showing off the experience you have within your market.

5. Be interesting as well as persuasive

Simply throwing sentences together for the sake of having something on your website isn’t going to win you any new customers. Each web page needs to tell an informative, compelling story that convinces prospective customers to deal with your business. All things considered, the text on your website is the most influential component and you need to make sure that your website is a highly effective salesman.

If you are not experienced in writing copy that can attract visitors as well as sell to them then invest in some professional SEO copywriting.

Kingswood Associates, the property finance and commercial mortgage specialist, asked Liberty Marketing to improve the ranking of its newly launched site at the beginning of 2009.

We already had a working relationship with Kingswood, managing their Pay Per Click advertising and email marketing, and now were responsible for greatly increasing traffic from the natural search listings.

The process involved a lot of on-site and off-site work, including:

SEO consultancy – We provided keyword research to find the phrases that could be competed for, would bring in traffic and would fit in with the business objectives. We then worked with Kingswood to build an online marketing strategy based on the main keywords chosen.

SEO copywriting – Amendments were made to many pages and entirely new ones were created to give the site more strength in the search engines. Keywords now feature more prominently where needed on each page and within the site structure.

Inbound link building – An intensive, on-going link building campaign has been in place where the site is connected to relevant directories and websites. The link building service generates direct traffic as well as helps push the site up the search results.

How has this benefited the business?

Within a few months the company has gone from barely being found on the search engines to coming up on the first page of Google for many local terms such as “mortgages Cardiff”, “mortgage brokers Cardiff”   and “buy to let mortgages Cardiff” as well as some competitive national phrases such as “residential mortgage broker” (coming in the top 5 listings out of over 3 million results).

Having such a large presence on the search engines has led to thousands of new visitors coming to the site over the past few months, and new mortgage enquiries every day of the week.

There is now enough traffic that the Pay Per Click advertising spend has be greatly reduced, meaning that Kingswood is now enjoying high levels of traffic and enquiries but is actually spending far less money on marketing.

AnswerMyPhone.biz, a telephone answering and message taking service, approached us to help with the promotion of their new website. The site had been designed but didn’t have much copy or many in-bound links, and as such wasn’t ranking at all well on Google or the other search engines.

What did we do?

1. We looked into the keywords that their target market were using, highlighting some niche markets that the business had not previously considered.
2. We wrote keyword rich copy for a number of key pages, including the homepage and service pages, based on the most commonly used keywords as well as the niche examples.
3. We provided advice on their on-page SEO and created internal links, descriptions and page titles based on the chosen keywords.
4. We started building links to the site from a variety of other websites including relevant and general directories.

What was the outcome?

We are pleased to say that within only a fortnight of the new copy being placed on the site we could see first page Google positions for some of their main keywords.

We are now working with the company to promote their site further and generate page one results for the rest of their chosen keywords.