Is your website as engaging as an infomercial?

(Updated: October 20, 2011)

Infomercials first showed up in the 1980s after President Reagan lifted the ban on long commercials. And they’ve earned kind of a bad reputation, but at the same time you have to admire how they manage to sell so well even during a down economy. All online product-sellers owe it to their future customers to take a page from the infomercial’s book and get REALLY informative — even overly informative — on their websites. It’s not as easy if you don’t have a video prepared, but it can be done using words and testimonials.

Do you have a great product or service but your website is just not getting enough search engine traffic to sell it? Don’t give up on the Internet as a sales vehicle just yet.

If your product is not so new or obscure that no one has heard of it (read my SEO cure for that here) I’m betting your site lacks significant content. Are you providing the massive amount of information your visitors need to convince them to buy from you? Or are you just giving them the minimum?

There’s a reason people get suckered in to buying those infomercial and QVC-type products: Content. I consider myself to be pretty sales-resistant, yet I’ve been seduced by late-night TV marketers many times myself. Why? Because they cover the product from an incredible array of angles. They answer every question you could possibly think of asking as well as every one it would never occur to you to ask until after you bought the product.

That the infomercial products usually turn out to be worth less than the price of shipping is beside the point. Your products are not crap, right? Then you have even more reason to make sure the world knows everything that is knowable about your products.

Where do keywords fit in?

The search engines know that the world is hungry for information. If your website provides a sumptuous dish that enough people are asking for, they’re more than willing to serve it up.

And the way they do that is with keywords. Search engines figure out which of the umpteen millions of sites in their database are relevant to the keywords in each search query.

In order to have a page of yours considered a match for a query, you have to optimize for the particular string of keywords in the query. And in order to decide which queries to optimize for, you have to know all the ways your target market tends to phrase their query. Many online business owners simply guess, and that can be a huge mistake. Your best bet is to research past search engine queries to learn what the popular phrases are as well as to get an idea of how people search. You’ll probably find it’s more time- and cost-effective to contract with a professional keyword researcher like myself. Not only do I subscribe to the only two legitimate databases of real search engine queries used by real people in the not-too-distant past, but I have 5 years’ experience to know which queries are worth optimizing for.

Once I’ve isolated the top hundred or so phrases that are a good fit for your product, you can begin to enrich the content on your site. As I collect your keywords I’ll observe as much about your target market’s needs as is evident from the way they tend to phrase their searches.

Nearly every product can have a ton of information pages designed to keep visitors happily reading for hours, and as every seller knows, the longer they hang around the more likely they are to buy.

Since you should focus on only a few keyword phrases per page, having a site that’s thin on content is counterproductive. The more content you have, the more keyword phrases you will be able to target. The more keywords you optimize for, the more your site will be found by the very customers searching for you.

When it comes to websites, less is not more. More is more!