search engine optimization

web design & development

Have you been updating your website as part of your content strategy?

Are your blog posts fresh? (We know how hard it can be to keep up with a blog, I mean, look at ours)

Is your content benefit-driven?

We give our clients the unique ability to change their content and some don't because they either are not sure what to write or they don't have time.

We recently received feedback from local business owner and Traverse City Area Chamber of Commerce member, Heidi Berden, who is interested in helping our clients enhance their credibility and save time. And she was very gentle with us as she mentioned that we, ah hem, have not been doing a stellar job of keeping up our own blog much less inspiring our clients to keep up with theirs.

As Berden read through some of the sites in our portfolio, she was pleased to find loads of strong content obviously created by savvy business people who know their businesses well, but also saw ample opportunities to give those messages more marketing power and appeal more directly to the shortened attention span on the web. She gave us some examples of expression that work better on the web:

Make your content benefit-driven

Read every phrase and ask whether or not you have highlighted a service or a benefit to your clients. You have mere seconds to tell them what's in it for them.

Avoid switching between first- and third-person

Watch for messages from your company that suddenly are about your company. You don't need to be an expert to spot this one. It's awkward.

Tweak phrases to be to be more powerful

A classic example is "not only" do we do this, but we also do that. "Not" and "but" have negative connotations. You actually do this and that.

Use upper and lower case

USE OF ALL CAPS has proven to be 60 percent more difficult to read and slows the eye. Do everything you can to make life easier for your site visitors.

Farm It Out

Berden surfs the Web looking for sites that have room for improvement. She recently made 115 "tweaks" to a website that had been up for a year. Mistakes she fixed included sentence structure, improper grammar and punctuation. Improvements included more powerful phrasing and a key to website success: benefit-driven content.

Creating content is not easy for some people and those who find it easy don't always have time. Berden says she makes that job easy by allowing clients to either simply call her with ideas or e-mail a draft and have her tweak it. She has discovered her gift of capturing ideas during her days as an editor has blossomed on the Web.

We want to be sure our clients are taking advantage of their ability to change content and maximize their website.

If you think you don't have time to blog, Berden wants you to call her (even while you're driving, hands-free, of course) and tell her what you want in a fresh blog post. She'll deliver a draft that is in your words, only better.

She might even draw out more ideas help you come up with posts and stories that you may not have thought about and make your life a little easier in the process.

Contact Berden at 231-587-8512 or heidi@tweaknut.com for more information.

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