How Can I Help You

How Can I Help You
Write for your customers!
Peter Lunn nails it!

#contentcreation  

Originally shared by Peter Lunn

Don’t write for search engines… write for your customers!
There’s often a lot of mystery and questions surrounding writing online. What should you write about? How long should it be? What can I do to make sure it has the right keywords for search engines?

The question of search engines came up recently as part of the project that EagleCO Vail2015 have been working on. In February, the 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships will take place in Vail/Beaver Creek. Just 25 miles west of Vail, in the small town of Eagle, a team of Google Plussers headed by Debi Davis have been working on helping to get Eagle businesses on the map and be ready for the influx of many thousands of visitors to the area. That has involved setting up Google My Business pages for participating businesses which in turn raised the question of what should be written to best represent them on their GMB About page.

Yet, whether you are writing a simple social page for your business or broader content for your website, there’s one question that should be at the forefront of your mind when you come to write for the web. That is the question: “How can I help you?”

How can I help you?
Consider for a moment the experience of walking into a small store in those days before supermarket-style self-shopping came about. As you opened the door, the bell above would give an inviting ching-ching ring and the shopkeeper would come to the counter to greet you, saying something like, "Good morning. How can I help you?". They are 7 simple words, but they are words that not only made you feel welcome, but also gave you an assurance that the shopkeeper was ready to listen to you - the customer.

Much the same experience should follow when you phone a business to ask about a product or service. If the person answering is focused on you the customer, then they also will be attentive to the reason for your call and be ready to answer your question.

So, why then, when we go online and visit a website, should our experience be any different? It shouldn’t really should it?

Why we should focus on our customers and not on search engines...
The problem with writing for the web is that we have been conditioned to think it is a special case. We have perhaps been told that for our web page to be found when someone searches it needs to contain all the right “keywords” that people will be searching for. We’ve been led to believe that if we sprinkle the right words around, even if repeating some of them several times feels and sounds a little bit clumsy, then don’t worry. After all Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO as you may have heard it called) is to do with optimising our web pages for search engines.

But think for a moment… since when did you ever sell anything to a search engine?!

Historically - and when using the word ‘historically” we’re only rolling the clock back a couple of years - writing for search engines, no matter how clumsy it might have been, is what worked. Thankfully though, search engines - and Google in particular - are getting smarter, so that they understand what people are searching for when they search - even if they don’t use the all the ‘right’ words.

A note of qualification though… I’m not saying that search engines are totally self-sufficient. There are things we can do to make our web content more search engine friendly (such as good Meta Title tags for each web page), but there’s been a shift in focus towards search engines understanding search queries better. 

Elvis has left the building, but Google is getting smarter
Try entering the following question into Google. (If you have voice search on your phone or tablet, then try asking it).

How old was the king of rock and roll when he died?

The answer you should get is 42.

Now consider the question again. No mention was made of Elvis Presley. The word ‘age’ was not used either. Yet Google was smart enough to know that the king of rock and roll was Elvis and that the question ‘how old...’ requires a number to answer it.

But what does all this mean when writing for the web?
First of all, it frees you from writing clumsy sentences focused on certain words to please search engines. That doesn't mean you won't use some keywords within what you write, but they'll fit naturally into the flow of what you say rather than being shoehorned in.

Secondly, it now means you can write for your customers and in particular to answer the questions they may have or to give them the information they might be looking for. When you write for the web, have that “how can I help you?” question in your mind.

What are the questions your customers ask you when they walk into your store? What information do they want when they give you a call? They will be questions you’re probably used to answering several times a day. Just as your customers ask you them face-to-face or over the phone, so your customers are asking many of those same things when they search online. The difference online is that you're competing with many others for your customers attention, so you need to make sure you answer them.

Most of all, be normal
So, when you write for the web what are you going to say? And how will you say it? Your online voice shouldn’t be very much different, if at all, to your offline voice. In fact, if you cannot hear yourself saying something to a customer face-to-face, then you probably shouldn’t be saying it online.

Be welcoming. Be engaging. But, most of all, be normal - and focus on helping your customer.

#EagleCo   #Vail2015   #ContentMarketing  

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This post was adapted from a post originally written for the EagleCO Vail2015 project

Image http://goo.gl/12eccY licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Author: Antonio Litterio