How your careful choice of words can dramatically alter conversion rates

on September 18, 2015 at 15:01

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During a conversation, have you ever said an inappropriate or wrong thing? All of us surely have, at one time or another.

Often an apology or correction solves an embarrassing moment and you can carry on. However, when using an automated creation process for landing pages for your website, it's possible to make poor word choices. The danger is you never know the effect of this, simply because this action can lose you potential business you didn't even know you might have had!

We're not talking here about serious cultural errors. It's more about a simple consideration of the best choices to make when targeting specific keywords on any page. It's also not an exact science, because one word can be powerful in one context and then much weaker in another. The results of your website conversion rate optimisation actions are designed to make effective contact with the minds of those most likely to want or need your product or service.

Therefore, for your business, it pays to take time to carefully consider those words (or phrases) that attract them – and others which might repel. Of course, these are different for all products or services, but here are some examples to help tune your brain to the process.

If you are selling insurance wouldn't "home" be more powerful than "house" or "property"? For expensive perfume, you would probably use "bouquet" or "scent" before "smell"! Does a "free consultation" offer as valuable a level of help as a "no-obligation expert assessment"?

A simple word such as "must" is used so often as a compellor, yet subconsciously, people don't like being told what they "must do". From childhood onwards, the term has built a rebellion in your mind! Equally, terms such as "might" suggest a level of doubt that "might" just put people off making that purchase or contact. Words like this seem almost to be building a "don't blame us if it doesn't work" excuse into the copy.

The above examples show how a different effect can be gained by a careless choice of language. An amusing example from a TV ad many years ago in the UK was the tagline: "Nothing works better than xxx". Obviously then, the answer was, as many people quickly pointed out, to "take nothing"!

 

Last modified: Tuesday, 01-Dec-2015 09:57:03 GMT