In SEO, the accepted goals always seem to be top SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking. But what about the content on the page itself? Once a visitor has landed on the SEO optimized webpage, what sort of content do we present to the visitor? Sure, SEO has done its job in ranking that page at the top and also in drawing in the clicks. But what’s next for the visitor?
We’re now slowly moving from realm of SEO to the realm of advertising. For most business websites, the ultimate objective is to eventually sell a product. However that can only happen once the visitor is convinced that your product is right for him. This is based on the awareness scale of your visitor, starting from completely unaware->problem aware->solution aware->product aware->most aware. This scale is also popularly known as the level of market sophistication.
The Most Aware (Level 1 market sophistication)
At the far end of this scale, also known as level 1 sophistication, the visitor knows your product, what it does and wants it. At this point, he just hasn’t gotten around to buying it yet. Your SEO headline (H1), need to just state the name of your product, and a bargain price.
SEO-MY Services – Small Business Package,
Formerly $1500 – Now Only $850.00
The rest of the page content can just summarize the most desirable selling points. Provide some guarantees, a discount coupon and a purchase button. This SEO page takes advantage of the full weight of all the advertising that has been done on the same product before this. It’s addition – a free gift, a discount voucher, instant delivery or proximity to the buyer is sufficient to close the sale, as the prospect is fully aware and has all the information he needs.
Product Aware (Level 2 market sophistication)
Here the visitor has heard of your product but isn’t completely aware of all your product does, or isn’t convinced of how well it does it, or hasn’t been told how much better it does now.
Here, in this approach to this segment of visitors is the great bulk of the convincing job. Here you are dealing with a product which is known – which has established a brand name which has already linked itself with an acknowledged public desire and has proven that it satisfied that desire.
Here, your SEO headline (H1) is faced with one of seven tasks.
- To reinforce your prospect’s desire for your product
- To sharpen his image of the way your product satisfies that desire
- To extend his image of where and when your product satisfies that desire
- To introduce new proof, details, documentation of how well your product satisfies that desire
- To announce a new mechanism in that product to enable it to satisfy that desire even better
- To announce a new mechanism in your product that eliminates former limitations
- Or to completely change the image or mechanism of that product in order to remove it from the competition of other products claiming to satisfy that same desire
In all seven cases, the approach is the same. You display the name of the product in the headline and use the remainder of the headline to point out its superiority. The content of that page is then an elaboration of that superiority – including visualization, documentation and mechanization. When you have finished weaving in every strand of your product’s superiority, your page is done.
Here are some example headlines from the seven cases.
a . To reinforce your prospect’s desire for your product
“Steinway-The Instrument of the Immortals.”
“Joy-The Costliest Perfume in the World.”
“Miss Clairol – Hair Coloring So Natural Only Her Hairdresser Knows For Sure”
b. To sharpen his image of the way your product satisfies that desire
“At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in a Rolls Royce is the electric clock”
“The amazing story of a Zippo that worked after being taken from the belly of a fish”
c. To extend his image of where and when your product satisfies that desire
“Anywhere you go, Hertz is always nearby.”
d. To introduce new proof, details, documentation of how well your product satisfies that desire
“9 Out of 10 screen stars use Lux Toilet Soap for their priceless smooth skins.”
“Jake La Motta, 160-lb fighter, fails to flatten Mono paper cup.”
“In Boston, the #1 tea-drinking city, the #1 tea is Salada”
e. To announce a new mechanism in that product to enable it to satisfy that desire even better
“Hoover’s new invention washes floors and vacuums up the scrub water”.
“World’s only dog food that makes its own gravy – Gaines Gravy Train.”
f. To announce a new mechanism in your product that eliminates former limitations
“You breathe no dusty odors when you do it with Lewyt.”
“A new Zenith hearing aid – inconspicuous beyond belief.”
Solution Aware (Level 3 market sophistication)
The prospect knows or suspect there exists a solution for a problem he is facing, but isn’t sure exactly what it is yet, or which one best fits his needs. Here, the SEO content has two challenges – to pinpoint the ill defined, as-yet-uncrystallized desire that is slowly spreading through great masses of people all over the world. And second, to crystallize that desire and its solution so sharply and so dramatically that each and every prospect will recognize it at a glance.
The three steps in the process are simple.
- Name the desire and/or its solution in your headline
- Prove that that solution can be accomplished
- Show that the mechanism of that accomplishment is contained in your product
As an SEO copywriter, you will find it necessary to define the particular market most receptive to your product, its location in relation to your product in terms of awareness and sophistication, and the driving emotional forces that have created both the market and the potential for the sales of your product within it. You will also need to give a name to the still-undefined. To capture a feeling, a hope, a desire, a fear in words. The create a catchword or a slogan. To focus emotion, and give it a goal.
Some examples:
“Light a Lucky, and you’ll never miss sweets that make you fat”
“Who else wants a whiter wash-with no hard work?”
“How to win friends and influence people.”
“To men who want to quit work some day.”
“When doctors feel rotten-this is what they do.”
“Who ever heard of 17,000 blooms from a single plant?”
Here, amorphous desire has been crystallized in the headline. Then sharpened and expanded in the first few paragraphs; satisfied and documented in the body content of the page; and focused inevitably on the product throughout.
Problem Aware (Level 4 market sophistication)
The prospect has – not a desire – but a need. He recognizes the need immediately. But he doesn’t yet realize the connection between the fulfillment of that need and your product.
This is the problem solving SEO content. Here you start by naming the need and/or its solution in your headline. Then dramatize the need so vividly that the prospect realizes just how badly he needs the solution. And then present your product as the inevitable solution.
Some examples:
“Corns?”
“Stops maddening itch.”
Many headlines in this category promise the removal of previously unconquerable limitations.
“Shrinks hemorrhoids without surgery.”
“Look, Mom! No cavities!”
“How a bald-headed barber helped save my hair.”
“Do you make these mistakes in English?”
Completely Unaware (Level 5 market sophistication)
This group of visitors would be the most difficult to sell to. The prospect is either not aware of his desire or his need or he won’t honestly admit it to himself without being lead into it by your content-or the need is so general and amorphous that it resists being summed up in a single headline-or it’s a secret that just can’t be verbalized.
This market sophistication level is the outer reach of the awareness scale. These are the people who are still the logical prospects for your product; and yet, in their own minds, they are hundreds of miles away from accepting that product. It is your job to bridge that gap.
Let me repeat what I said when we first began to explore these five stages of awareness. Each of these stages is separated from the others by a psychological wall. On one side of that wall is indifference, on the other, intense interest. A headline that will work wonders in the first stage, for example, “Dial Soap-9 cent a cake” – will fail completely when addressed to a third stage market, where your prospect doesn’t even realize that soaps can be made with built-in deodorants. And a third stage headline-for example, “Who else wants a whiter wash with no hard work?” – will be old-hat, no-news to today’s housewife, who has been barraged by whiter-than-white advertising for twenty years.
To sum up, then: a headline which will work to a market in one stage of awareness will not work to a market in another stage of awareness. Nor will it work, even to a market in which it has been successful, once that market passes on to a new stage of awareness.
Most products are designed to satisfy a specific need or desire. They are born into markets that are at least the third or fourth stages of awareness. They may therefore never be faced with the problem of an unaware market.
However, many products actually pass out of public awareness – or out of public acceptance-at some point or other during their life histories. The desire they satisfy dries up, or other products serve it better, or they are branded “old-fashioned”.
Again, we are dealing with a matter of statistics. When a product begins to slip… when volume falls out even though advertising budgets are increased… when the name of a product no longer sells as much… when a direct statement of a product’s function no longer sells as much… when a direct statement of the desire or the need that the product fulfills no longer sells as much- then that product needs to be reborn, and its problem is the problem of opening up an unaware market.
Again, this is the most difficult, the most challenging type of SEO content of all. There are few positive milestones to guide you. But fortunately, there are some completely self-evident negative rules that can eliminate many blind alleys, and set you face to face against your task. Planning a headline for a completely unaware, or resistant market, then, is first of all a process of elimination. Here are the first paths:
- Price means nothing to a person who does not know your product, or want your product. Therefore, eliminate all mention of price, or price reduction, in your headline or prime display type.
- The name of your product means nothing to a person who has never seen it before, and may actually damage your ad if you have had a bad model the year before, or if it is now associated with the antiquated, the unfashionable, or the unpleasant. Therefore, keep your product out of the headline, and be extremely wary about breaking the mood or disguise of your content with a prominent logo.
- And this is the hardest fact of all to accept. At this stage of your market, a direct statement of what your product does, what desire it satisfies, or what problem is solves, simply will not work. Your product either has not reached that direct stage, or has passed beyond it. And you cannot simply shift from one desire to another. You are not faced here with a problem of sophistication, but one of complete indifference, or unacceptability. Therefore, the performance of your product, and the desire it satisfies can only be brought in later. You cannot mention them in your headline.
So you cannot mention price, product, function or desire. What do you have left? Your market, of course. Once you have accepted the challenge of wiring this kind of content, then your product and its attributes fade into the background, and you concentrate exclusively on the state of mind of your market at this particular moment.
What you are doing essentially in this fifth stage is calling your market together in the headline of your content. You are writing an identification headline. You are selling nothing, promising nothing, satisfying nothing. Instead, you are echoing an emotion, an attitude, a dissatisfaction that picks people out from the crowd, and binds them together in a single statement.
In this type of headline, you are telling them what they are. You are defining them for themselves. You are giving them the information they need and want, about a problem still so vague that you are the first to put it into words.
Here, above all, is the type of headline that never attempts to sell a product or a performance, but simply tries to sell the remainder of the content itself-the information that follows on the page. The only function of this headline is to get the prospect to read the next paragraph. And this second paragraph pulls him into the third, and the third into the fourth, and right down the page, paragraph after paragraph.
Meanwhile, these paragraphs are building a steady progression of logical images, from the first identification with the headline, to a growing awareness of the problem or the desire, to the realization that a solution is at hand, and to the inevitable focusing of that desire and that solution onto your particular product.
This then, is the general strategy for dealing with an unaware market. The application of this strategy, when all direct methods have failed, has produced hundreds of great headlines.
As you can see, it is one thing to produce keyword rich content to rank highly in the search engines but another to target the customer segments at the different levels of market sophistication. If your goal is more than just using SEO for traffic but instead to produce SEO content that also converts and sells, then my advice would be to study the art of copywriting as there are lots of hidden gems from the advertising realm that we can incorporate into SEO for the combined impact of traffic and also conversions.
