Ok, well I’m guessing you have read Basic Content For Your Web Site, where it was all about you. With a beer or glass of wine you came up with a list of keywords that best describe your business and the products and services that it sells. Then from that list you chose a more descriptive domain name, put together your introduction and have started on your About page and begun on your secondary keywords. Now it’s time to get thinking about how your going to promote the products and services that you sell. As it’s good to tell the world who you are and what you do, it’s your products and services that you want noticed by new customers and search engines.
“Remember content may be king, but it was original content that created the dynasty…” anon.
We Are All The Same Without Original Content
When you compress the reason to be in business into it’s most basic form, it’s to deliver a product or a service. From there you expand into the industry you know and have a passion for. At some point you realise everything is the same. That is, your competitors sell the same group of products or services. (This is known as “Homogeneity”).
Even if you are the first on the market with X, sooner or later there will be a similar copy out there competing with you. As a brick and mortar company you may only have 3 or 4 direct competitors in your surrounding area, but once you expand onto the internet, that expands to 3 or 4 thousand or more, all the same as you, shouting just as loud. I don’t want to scare you off but it’s just a fact of life in the wonderful world of the web.
Potential customers perceive products and services differently. Using original content it is these differences that you need to focus on first when trying to describe want you want to promote and sell, especially on the internet.
How Products & Services are perceived
Products
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
- Distribution
Services
- The People
- The Process
- Physical Evidence
Services
When referring to the perception box above, it is the people who deliver the services that is at the top of the list. Basically, without people there is no service. Hence it is very important to prove to potential visitors, that there are actual people on the other side of all your pretty pictures and well crafted text. Hopefully you have started this process by including a quick bio about yourself and any staff that your may have in you about page. If you decided to have auto-responders for your contact forms etc, it is also a good idea to have it from a particular person with their phone number in the signature, as it will give the email a personal touch.
Service Categories
Depending on how many services you offer you customers you may want to section them into categories. When creating the categories, don’t forget to give it a description, which would contain a couple of your relevant primary and secondary keywords for that category. Normally a category name would be one of your primary keywords.
Continuing with our example from “Basic Content For Your Web Site“, Mels Hair has the primary keyword “Weddings”, which is obviously a category when it come to the Hair and Beauty industry. So her category info could be like the following.
Category Name: Weddings
Description:
Choose from a vast portfolio of styles and accessories from Mels Hair for you and your Bridal Party or have your Style Tailor Made for your perfect day. We have extensive experience with Wedding Hair-Ups and Styles and are able to come to you with everything needed for your big day
Specific Services
Once you have added your service categories it is time to add the specific services you offer. When describing each of these services, it’s a good idea to add the following information, which relates back to the Customer Perception box above
Use the name of the person, people or team that will be performing the service, as this will influence the perception by the customer. Depending on how you have set your page layout, you could add a quick bio of those involved in the sidebar.- Describe the process of what you are going to do. Try and include as many of the steps from the beginning to the end of the experience and the outcome. That way the customer knows what to expect.
- Add a testimonial of a happy customer and maybe a photo or video of you performing the service as proof/physical evidence that you can perform the service you are promoting. Before and after photos are always displayed, though I am of the opinion that the “during phase” should also be displayed.
- To keep a customer engaged in your site it maybe an idea to add a quote/booking form at the bottom or side of your description.
Make sure you’ve added the service to the correct category, don’t laugh it happens more than you realise. Since you’ve added the names of the people/team that will be performing the service and a testimonial, the search engines will see the content for your services as unique which is a very good thing.
The above may seem simple and quite obvious information to add to your web site to promote your service, but they are important and sometimes forgotten.
In “Creating Original Content for Products” I will talk about creating content for products. This is where homogeneity really comes into play, as more often than not companies will just use the same content supplied by the manufacture or supplier to save time and money.
Till next time,
D