Tedious, pandering, and even a little over the top. You might find Sales Copywriting on most sites to be boring. Their end goal is to sell you something so they usually don’t care about the quality of their content, often belaboring the point to death.
You’re trying to engage with your audience to tell a story. The opposite usually happens, writers write for Google instead of their audience when they need to do both.
In the case of Sales Copywriting for Google, people will find your site but they often don’t care about what they see. The problem then becomes fixing your content so it appeals to your audience and search engines at the same time.
How to Write Sales Content
You need to ask yourself a few questions before you sit down to write something. After you have a quality piece written for your audience, then you can turn to SEO tools to make it “Google-friendly.”
Questions to Ask for Sales Copywriting
Start by asking who your audience is so you know what they want to hear. Despite your gimmicky Sales Copywriting content, they do come to you for a reason, they want what you have.
The next thing is to ask WHY they want what you have. If your business sells beauty products, why does your audience keep coming back to you? There are a million other companies selling beauty products so what makes your company unique?
You might respond to that question with “Because we’re the best, we have the best quality products, we have the best prices,” etc. I’ll use some real-world examples to show you how original these sales copywriting content tropes are.
This example is from JC Penny’s women’s tops section:
If you look closely, you can see that they are just trying to stuff different clothing terms into the small space they use. This is great for Google but what does the reader get out of it?
“Button front shirts have amazing versatility; you can mix and match them with a variety of bottoms.”
Can you mix and match different shirts and pants? Who knew? They just threw a bunch of key terms into a paragraph, not really interesting.
Now, let’s look at another clothing company to see what they did. The following example is from H&M.
You can see they take a completely approach to their content. H&M’s audience is much younger, statistically younger shoppers care more about the environment. They took that knowledge and supplied readers with exactly what they wanted to hear.
Back to the point, if you read content on your competitor’s site you’ll see them use the same verbiage. They’re all “the best!” First, people don’t care if you use arbitrary words. Second, they won’t take your word for it anyway.
The purpose of Sales Copywriting is to give your audience what they want. So when you’re asked “what makes your store the best,” maybe it’s because you use an essential oil found only in the Himalayan Mountains, maybe a portion of your proceeds go to children in need, maybe your company actively employs retired veterans. Whatever makes you unique and appeals to your audience, flaunt it.
Center content on consumer interest first then use SEO tactics to make it better for search engines.
There are a million and one ways to stand out as a company. Saying you’re the best doesn’t make it so. You need to know your audience to connect with them through the right words, plain and simple.
