Ready to take your new service to the world?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at a handful of techniques you can use to communicate more clearly about your product or service as you launch it:

• a unique brand vocabulary
• SEO-related copy techniques
• interface text and CTAs
• readability tools
• benefit and feature differentiation.

And we’ve seen how you can build all these into a concise but compelling launch website.

Now, you may have done all these things as well as you can. But does that mean the copy you’ve written about your new product or service is guaranteed to communicate what you want it to?

Well, no. But there are a few steps you can take to get an idea of how well your copy succeeds. The first one? A copy review.

Did you just roll your eyes? Don’t worry: the copy review is less hassle than you think.

The ten-minute review

That’s right: your review of your homepage copy need take no more than ten minutes.

After all, you don’t want your users spending half an hour wading through copy and videos and free-trial-live-tour-click-to-chat messaging before they get it. Right?

So why would it take you that long? Let’s get this done.

1. Come with fresh eyes

Don’t try to review your copy straight after you’ve written it.

Give it at least a half-day (if you’re on a super-tight timeframe), but ideally, leave a day or three in between the writing and the review.

This will make sure you’re in a different headspace—and that you have the much-touted “fresh eyes”—with which to review your copy.

Better yet, try consciously to put yourself in your customers’ shoes before you begin.

2. Print the laid-out page (1 minute)

Yes, I did just say the P word.

Why would you print your web copy? After all, your users are going to read it on-screen, so you should review it in the same environment, right?

Not quite. The reason you need to print the page is the same reason you’re reviewing the laid-out page, rather than going over your copy as you drafted it in Word or Docs.

Because you’re looking at how it communicates to customers.

You need to see the text in the context of the page layout and visuals. But to review the coherence of the messaging overall—to make sure the thing’s complete, and you’re not missing anything along the way—you need to see it all at once, in full.

Of course, you should also review your content on-screen. But the full review starts with a printed page.

3. Take it in (2 minutes)

After all the work you’ve done to create the page, you’ll know in your own mind exactly what you’re trying to communicate to readers about your brand, and your product or service.

So take the page in in its entirety. Look it over; read it over; scan; skip. Whatever you want to do to take the page in, do it.

Now, as a user, how excited would you be about responding to the page’s CTA after taking in this page?

Are the key messages you wanted to communicate being expressed clearly? Do you feel they’re coming across the right way—in a friendly tone of voice, for example, rather than as directions or instructions?

What feeling does the page give you overall? Does it say what you want to say about your brand and this product or service?

You’ve just answered a bunch of important questions about messaging and sense. Rather than trying to solve any problems you’ve uncovered, make note of them and move on.

4. Spot problems (3 minutes)

It’s time to get a bit more specific. Go over the page again, asking yourself these kinds of questions:

• Does anything look weird?
• Does anything sound funny?
• Does anything grate on me?

The idea here is to tap into your gut feel and hunches. You’re not looking for issues at pixel level: you’re looking at issues of visual communication.

These questions can turn up all kinds of problems—from layout issues, to mismatches between the sense of copy and its accompanying images, to clumsy expression.

On the page itself, mark up those things that are bothering you. Again, you don’t have to have solutions just yet—the important thing is to note any problems.

5. Check consistency (4 minutes)

At this point, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of the key aspects of your communication.

Check firstly that you’ve used your brand vocabulary consistently.

If you haven’t, look at why that is. It might be natural error or personal preference, or it might be that a word you’ve included in there isn’t as useful or natural as another would be, in which case, your brand vocab may need revising.

Mark up any corrections you need to make.

Next, make sure your messaging is complete. Think about the things you wanted to say when you started writing the page. Have you communicated all the benefits you want to? What about features—are they easily accessible?

Is there a logical flow to the page, and between each portion of it? What about between each sentence? Does each piece of information build on the others—and is the page scannable enough for each to succeed independently, too?

Is there anything that’s missing? Now that you’re seeing the page in its entirety, can you think of anything that customers are likely to want to know that you’ve left out?

This review will help you make the page as communicative and targeted as possible, and let you work out how to make ancillary information readily accessible if it’s not to be included within the copy of the home page.

Finally, look at your messaging and see that you’ve included links wherever they’re appropriate.

If I’m working with an unusual or specific brand vocabulary, I might link key terminology to FAQs that explain those concepts. This can be especially helpful if you’re targeting users who are new to the product category or the brand.

Make sure that your CTAs look clickable, and that the way clickable elements are presented is consistent, too.

Time’s up

That’s it: your ten-minute review is done. At this point, you should have a printed copy of your home page that’s got notes and scribbles here and there.

You’ll also have a good idea of how well you think the page communicates what different types of users want to know—and feel—before they’ll respond to your CTA.

And you might have a few things to tweak or revisit before you launch, too.

Of course, there’s one issue that we haven’t discussed in this post—an elephant in the room, if you will—and that’s spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Did you check that in your review? Are there errors you’re overlooking … and will your users pick them up and point them out?

We’ll avoid that unfortunate eventuality next week, when we see just how much the rules of language actually matter in the online context. In the meantime, let us know in the comments what issues your homepage review turns up.

Do you list product or service features on your site? What about benefits?

If you’re going to communicate clearly with the audience for whatever it is you offer, you’ll need to understand the difference between these two concepts. Then you’ll need to be able to define them for your product and your audience.

Without this knowledge, your landing page or promo email is likely to read as a mishmash of Interesting Things About My Product. Whether or not they hit the mark for your audience will depend on chance.

But once you get these concepts—and they’re not exactly rocket science—you’ll be able to really speak to the people you want to reach.

Feature or benefit?

When you’re looking at your own (darn fine, I’m sure) handiwork and thinking about what it offers, it can be all too easy to get carried away.

It has this! It does that! It’s better than Brand X! It’s the first Y of its kind! It’s a game changer!

But which of these are features? And which are benefits? There are some pretty easy ways to tell.

Fact versus feeling

One way you can work out if something is a feature or a benefit is to ask yourself whether it’s a fact, or it’s a feeling.

“Compatible with iOS 6″ is a fact. There’s no feeling there. It’s a feature.

“Helps you keep up with friends” speaks to a feeling. We looked at this line when we reviewed the Flickr homepage. There, it was presented as an outcome of the comment and note functionality—or features—that Flickr provides.

If you find yourself falling down the “but it does help you keep up with friends! That’s a fact too!” rabbit hole, don’t think so literally about the terms.

The word “feelings” implies an emotional component that facts don’t have. How many people are going to get emotional about iOS compatibility? Few (none?). But most of us feel good about the idea of keeping up with our friends’ adventures.

Product versus audience

Another way to work out if something’s a feature or a benefit is to ask who has it: the product or the audience? Free phone credits are a feature of a phone plan. The credits are something the product has bundled with it.

But benefits are a function of a feature’s interaction with the audience. For parents buying the plan for their kids, free phone credits might mean peace of mind: they know little Betty can always call if she needs to, so she’ll never get stuck somewhere without a way to get home.

But for Betty, free phone credits may mean she stays better connected with her friends, and doesn’t miss any important gossip as she attempts to scale the social ladder at school.

This raises an important point: benefits can meet conscious needs (staying connected with friends) or subconscious needs (social maneuvering). So it’s important to know your audience and their needs up front. This will help you work out how to pitch the benefits of your service in a way that speaks to those particular people.

Features and benefits in action

Let’s use these two approaches together to try to decipher benefits from features in the real world.

We’ll take lumosity.com as an example. Here’s their brief service description, which I found on a landing page for their service (that is, not the homepage):

Okay, so what about these three points? What’s a benefit, and what’s a feature?

I’d say the first is a benefit, because it’s something the customer has, and the statement elicits a feeling.

The second two points are features, as they’re facts related to something the product has: it’s digital, and it offers tracking.

Getting creative

Further down that landing page we can see features and benefits presented in a different way. They’ve been separated, and the benefits are presented in the words of users, as testimonials.

The business owners I work with often feel that they need testimonials as a form of social proof, and they certainly achieve that goal.

But as this example shows, some well-chosen testimonials can translate features into user-relevant benefits, almost without you having to do a thing—except, of course, choosing examples that convey the precise benefits you want to promote.

How many features? How many benefits?

Now you can immediately tell a benefit from a feature. You can make a list of features for your product or service, and quickly translate each one into a benefit to your audience.

But which should you focus on in selling your product or service: features or benefits? How can you strike the right balance?

If you own the product, or you developed it, you probably think you have a gut feel for the right answers here. But in truth, you’re probably too close to your offering to see it as objectively as you need to.

Enter: Consumer Involvement Theory. This is a theory of customer behaviour that looks at a product and assesses how involved, and how emotional or rational, customers are when they’re deciding to buy it. For the full background, this article is concise but informative.

How can CIT help us? It lets us position our products within a matrix like this one:

Involvement refers to the complexity of the purchase. Buying a subscription to the average app probably rates pretty low on the scale of involvement—unless, as with some productivity apps, for example, users think their jobs depend on making the right choice.

For lumosity, I think involvement might be low to middling.

Emotional purchases are ones that we want to feel strongly about—purchases we buy into emotionally. Informational purchases tend to be more about gathering facts to rationally make the “best” choice.

For lumosity, I think the purchase is probably about health and (mental) fitness, so while we’re going to make a rational decision based on information, there’s no doubt we have an emotional investment in the decision at some level.

So a balance would need to be struck between benefits and features to sell the service, and this is what we see on the lumosity homepage.

Put the theory to work for you

Take a minute to work out where your offering fits on the matrix. This should give you an idea of how much you need to focus on benefits, and how much on features.

You might then allocate a percentage of your message to talk of benefits, and a percentage to features. Will it be 50/50? 75/25? Once you’ve worked that out, you can roughly apply that percentage split to your word counts, page layouts, and so on, to make sure you’re communicating what you need to in the way that best suits your audience.

While you’re at it, prioritize your features and benefits on the basis of your product or service’s value proposition or USP.

Now you’ve got some nice lists of features and benefits, ordered by importance. And you know how much focus you need to give to each. The only question that’s left is: how will you present them?

As a specs list that lets users easily compare your offering against others?

As a customer or member video that shows the benefits one individual gained from your service—and inspires others to join?

Or something else? Let us know what’s most likely to suit your brand—and your audience—in the comments.

When we talked about Instagram recently, we looked at the elevator pitch they put on their home page. Mailchimp‘s got a similarly neat, clear service explanation. And, going one step further, the home page for Uber cabs uses three quick steps to explain its service.

Yet when you try to describe your service in snappy sentences for your home page, you end up with clunky paragraphs of blergh.

What gives? Do you need to be a superstar writer to make great copy? Well, it doesn’t hurt. But if you’re not a superstar writer, and you can’t afford to hire one, then what?

Today, I want to show you a quick and easy tool that can help. In the next minute or two, I’ll show you how it can:

• simplify the language you use
• talk about your product’s features and benefits
• talk to users in their own terms.

And we’ll get some extra bonuses along the way.

The tool

Really? A tool that does all that? What is it? I mentioned the tool when we talked about how SEO can help you communicate.

It’s readability scores.

If you have MS Word, you can access readability scores when you do a spell check. First, you’ll need to turn it on: got to Word > Preferences > Spelling and Grammar > Show readability statistics. Then, run a spell-check over some text. Once it’s finished, it’ll present a readability statistics dialog.

Don’t have Word? Do a search for online readability calculators and you’ll come up with a range of options, like this one, which lets you drop in your text and calculate a number of different readability scores instantly.

The ones I focus on mainly are the Flesch Readability Score (which shows what percentage of the population would be able to comprehend the text) and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level score, which reflects the typical grade in school a reader would need to have achieved to understand the text.

Easier reading = more meaning

So let’s see these readibility tools in action. As an example, we’ll look at the service information from the Flickr homepage.

If you’re a writer, you’ll see that one of these sentences is ungrammatical. If you have a keen eye, you might be wondering about the mishmash of ampersands and the word “and”. (Why not pick one or the other? My guess is layout.) But let’s focus on how comprehensible this text is.

When I copy this content into Word and check its scores, we’re looking at readability score of 71.8 and a grade level of 6.0.

That’s not bad. But could we improve it? Let’s see. Here’s a revised version of that text.

Upload
Get your photos online fast.
Uploading photos to Flickr is quick and easy. Use the web, your mobile, email or your favorite photo apps.

Discover
See what’s going on in your world.
Add tags, locations and people to your photos. Use comments and notes to share your stories, and keep up with friends.

Share
Take your photos with you.
Share your photos through Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs and more. With Flickr, sharing’s easy and secure.

What do you think?

This text’s readability score is 83.8 and its grade level is just 3.5. That means it makes a lot more sense to a lot more people than the copy that’s online on Flickr’s homepage right now.

Grammar time

Readability tools work by encouraging us to use better grammar. If you hate grammar, don’t worry: the techniques you can use to improve the readability of what you write about your service are pretty basic.

1. Break up sentences: Shorter sentences are easier to read. Here I’ve taken each point in the text and made it its own sentence—but be aware that this can change the shape of your message. That last sentence, for example, gives more weight to the ease and security of sharing than the original copy.
2. Use shorter, more common words: The original text didn’t exactly contain outlandish language, but I did remove some of the longer words: multiple, applications, information, everywhere, upload.
3. Avoid the passive voice: If you’re using “ing” words, you’re probably talking in the passive voice. This text didn’t have that problem, but making passive sentences (like this one) active is another easy way to improve readability. An easy way to do that is to put a person (your customer or user!) into the sentence: If you make passive sentences active, you’ll improve readability.

This isn’t the full gamut of techniques you can use to improve readability, but they’re easy ways for anyone—entrepreneur, developer-turned-writer-for-the-afternoon—to boost the readability of their words.

Brand messaging

It’s one thing to improve your writing. But you don’t want to dilute the brand messaging in the process, right? This is definitely something you’ll want to consider, so let’s see how it played out in the Flickr example.

On reading the original text, it seemed to me that it hadn’t been updated in a while. For example, even the least web-savvy person—my mum—unfailingly calls apps “apps” today. She may not have a cell phone, or often discuss apps, but when she does, that’s what she calls them.

Social media sites have made the concepts of tags, locations and people pretty much universal. Who calls this “rich information” now? No-one I know. Most of us see it—and being able to upload stuff to our accounts from anywhere—as basic product functionality, rather than a key selling point.

So my rewrites have changed the messages in this text slightly. I’ve made the first point about effortlessness, rather than the variety of options, since I don’t know that the variety of options is that much of a selling point for most people.

The second point contains the same messaging as the first, but puts the essential features first, before finishing on a heart-warming benefit. Awww.

The third point again replicates the messaging in the original version, but pulls the features (sharing techniques) and benefits (easy, secure) apart to make them clearer.

I did change the subhead on this point, and I can see that my new subhead might get marketing kickback (“we don’t want to suggest they’re going anywhere else, but that they’re already everywhere. This sounds too final”). But I’d argue that in this context, it’s fair to imply that people spend time on sites other than Flickr, and that the text makes logical and conceptual sense, neatly completing the messaging.

Features and benefits

Many entrepreneurs have trouble differentiating between features and benefits when it comes to talking about their products. We’ll look at this in more detail next week, but for now, I wanted to point out that as well as being easier to read and understand, the revised text makes features and benefits clearer than the original.

In the new text, each of the three points contains a sentence about features, and a sentence about benefits. The first point puts the benefits first; the second and third put the features first. In each case, the text makes it very clear what you get, and what it does for you.

What readability can do for you

Congratulations. We’ve just used readability tools to:

• simplify the language we use
• improve our grammar
• more clearly define product features and benefits
• update our text to reflect the competitive context in which we’re offering this service
• talk to users on—and in—their own terms.

They’re simple tools and simple techniques. But they can make a huge difference to how you communicate with your target users—on site, within your interface, in system emails and autoresponders, you name it.

Have you ever used readability tools? Do you think you might give them a try?

Many developer-business owners and entrepreneurs I speak to have fallen prey to the “this thing I built will sell itself” trap. Then they wonder why no one downloads their new product, or signs up to their new service. Then they call in a copywriter.

What’s the problem here? If you ask me, the strong focus on MVP among startups doesn’t help.

A minimum-viable-product focus sees your team working round the clock to ship something. They get to launch date, and realise they don’t really have any product information—collateral, if you will—to support that launch.

So they whack a signup or download page together, list their app in the App store and Play, and tweet about it. The MO is: build something that works, get it out there, and see if it flies.

But what’s the point of racing to launch an MVP if that’s all you’re going to do? An MVP might make business sense. What doesn’t is to follow it up with an MVW—a minimum viable website.

In this article, we’ll see how you can easily support your next product or service launch with a smart landing page—and without a copywriter if your launch budget won’t allow it.

Let’s take a look at a new, recently released app that’s close to home: SitePoint’s own podling.

An MVW in action

The website that accompanied the recent release of podling is really just a landing page with four words on it.

To find out anything about this service, you need to go offsite, to the podling page on the Apple store, where you get a brief description of the app, and a screen capture.

Many Apple app developers will argue that the page on the Apple store is the main game, and that the website doesn’t matter. But if you’re really going to grow your market beyond the first wave of innovators, you’ll need more than an Apple store page.

What’s an innovator? In any audience, there are five types of customers: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Only one of these groups—the risk-taking, tech-loving innovators—is going to bother downloading an app to find out what it does and work out how it can help them. And only a small portion will bother to do that. After all, there are plenty of apps out there. Why should they bother downloading yours?

So what’s the solution here? Do you need a full-blown website for your MVP? Well, no—but if you’re going to give your product or service the best chance of getting audience attention and uptake—an MVA (minimum viable audience), you might say—you’re going to need more than an MVW.

Let’s take a look at another example that ups the ante.

Instagram: basic, done well

The Instagram site does a pretty good job of presenting the app. While Instragram is not an MVP, this kind of website is achievable by any startup or small business.

Like podling’s, this landing page contains the brand name and a four-word tagline. It also has links to the Apple store and Play—to download pages that offer a range of screenshots and details about the app.

But Instragam has a couple of extra assets on its website.

The first is a little blurb, containing key words from the brand vocabulary, which is closely aligned with the category (photography) vocabulary: filters, share, post, and photos.

Why not introduce your new product or service with a quick, friendly elevator pitch? Sure, writing a quick, friendly elevator pitch that means something to users is easier said than done. But it is doable.

The other assets Instagram is using to promote downloads? Help content and a blog link.

Few startups have a blog to point users to at the launch of their product. That’s fine. Linking to your blog from your landing page once you have both assets is, I hope, a no-brainer.

But what about FAQs? Instagram calls this “Support” in its IA, but “Help Centre” at the source.

As Instagram has done, you might just link to your FAQs from your landing page footer. This:

• shows you care. The fact that you’ve got FAQs suggests that you care about your users, not just your glorious technology.
• shows that you understand users. You know that not everyone will want to sign up or download to find out about your offering. Your FAQs are free information for those who want it.
• shows that you’re serious. FAQs show you’re committed to your product or service. The fly-by-nighters wouldn’t bother to create FAQs, would they? No. But you have, because you’re building something bigger than an app—you’re building a business, and relationships with real people: your users.
• is not “in your face.” If users want more information, the reasoning goes, they’ll likely look around for it. If they don’t—if they’re happy to download—they won’t even notice you have FAQs. They’re there if you want them, and will probably go largely unnoticed if you don’t.

Note that your FAQs don’t need to be as extensive as these—you could just have a handful of key questions at launch, and build on them over time. No big deal.

Think about it: most of us know what Instagram is and does. Yet the business provides all this information. On the other hand, countless new-to-market apps with no authority or brand presence tell users next to nothing about themselves.

Don’t hope users will bother to download your app to find out what it does. That is no way to build a userbase.

Focus instead on providing them with access to all the content assets—all the information you have about your new product that may interest them. Use what you have to tell your product or service story.

No, users probably won’t need it all. But different users look for different pieces of information, and different types of reassurance. Your landing page needs to address as many of them as it can if your MVP is going to attract an MVA.

Going further

Okay, so to launch your MVP, you want a landing page that has:

• your brand name and tagline
• some information about what the product or service does for the user
• a sign up form or link to download as required
• a link to support or FAQs that provides more information for those who want it.

What if your product or service is a little more involved than Instagram? And what are you going to do with that demo video you stuck on YouTube so you could tweet it? What about that recommendation you got from an influencer in your industry?

Take a leaf out of Evernote’s book: they’ve smartly integrated these elements—along with selected FAQs and blog posts—into their landing page.

Evernote’s even gone so far as to include links to “Product Guides”, which detail the technical features of each release for each platform.

You might not have this level of user-friendly documentation. But let’s say you wrote a whitepaper or ebook that explains your offering to encourage people to sign up for your service. Could you include that as a permanently offered download from your product’s landing page?

Could you embed your YouTube demo? Could you add that great comment the industry pundit said about your brand as a featured quote?

The answers to these questions will depend on the nature of the content assets you have at your fingertips, and your audiences. And, of course, the goal isn’t just to jam a whole lot of stuff on your landing page.

But if you’re launching an MVP, and you have any content assets that could be presented to, or repurposed for, potential customers, take a look at them. See what’s worth including—and where there are information gaps that you need to fill.

“Lighter is better” … or is it?

One objection I hear to this position—in which you provide information on your new product or service, rather than expecting people to learn about it by using it—is that “it’s too much.”

“Too much information is overwhleming,” people say. “It’s a simple product! So simple! It doesn’t need a bunch of words around it. I’d rather let the app speak for itself.”

Newsflash: if your landing page doesn’t convince users to download your product or sign up for your service, it’s not going to get a chance to speak for itself.

Remember the Instagram example. You could hardly say there was too much information on that landing page.

When you’re launching a product or service, less information probably won’t mean more customers. Including, or linking to, carefully chosen, well-pitched supporting content on your landing page is the smarter way to sell your new product or service.

What does your product or service landing page look like? Does it use key words from your brand vocabulary? Does it provide users with enough information to pique their interest—and download or sign up? Let us know in the comments.

I never met a developer who advocated SEO. Most of the entrepreneurs I know see it as a business essential—like a bank account, or a band name. And copywriters seem divided: SEO is either the way to structure any and all text, or a last-minute add-on to make the marketers happy.

Recently, I was working with a client who realised half-way through copy development that he wanted to include the current website’s existing body text into the new content we were writing.

Why? SEO. He was worried his business would lose search rank if he replaced the current web text.

I suggested keeping the current text intact as it was and framing the new copy around it, but he liked our new copy better. He wanted to shoehorn existing sentences into the new content wherever they might fit (so long as it was fairly high up on the page).

He revised a page of our draft text to integrate these sentences. We’re not talking a lot of copy here: maybe 50-75 words. But it read badly. In fact, the readability scores for his revised text were two full grades higher than our original copy.

When I pointed this out, along with some factual issues in the current text that we were aiming to eliminate with the new text, he gave me this answer:

“Oh, I don’t think that matters. No one will read it anyway—I think they’ll just read the headings here and click through to the product demo.”

Well then, I wondered, why clutter up the page with all these boring words anyway? Let’s delete them, leave the headings, and let the people just click on through (if indeed that’s what they were going to do).

The problem with SEO as SEO

This client saw SEO as a separate issue from communication. Of course we couldn’t delete the words no one was going to read from this page—they were the thing that would get us search traffic.

But once those people came, they wouldn’t bother reading the text, they’d just click through. Right?

Well, maybe. I don’t know about you, but as a searcher, when I click through from a search result, the first thing I do is look for the words I’m searching for on the page that’s displayed. Ideally, they’ll be contained in headings, because I’m scanning at this point, and keywords in headings act like signposts: here’s what you’re searching for.

If not headings, it’s good if keywords are contained in links because they’re scannable too. If not there, then I guess I’ll just have to start scanning actual sentences (yawn). Or maybe I’ll just hit the Back button and try another search result.

I don’t think this is an abnormal use case. I believe this is how a lot of people often behave with search results.

Don’t dismiss SEO. Use it to your advantage. It doesn’t have to be about keyword stuffing to address machine algorithms. SEO can be about providing potential users of your product or service with the information they’re looking for.

SEO can help communication

Woah, what? SEO can help communication? Come on. Who are we kidding here?

Okay, we all know that keywords and phrases are never going to comprise your brand messaging (I hope!) or your entire content (I hope!), though if they’re particular enough, some of them may creep into your brand vocabulary.

But knowing what people are searching for, and how your product or service meets that need, can help you communicate more clearly—and more quickly—with those users.

It can tie your brand closely to the user’s need from the outset.

Search term: washing woollens

It can present your unique offering as the precise solution to a generic problem—at a glance.

Search term: logo design in Melbourne

SEO isn’t just about long-form text and sales speak. It’s about making a page answer the user’s questions clearly and efficiently—from the opening phrase (whether that’s your IA or page headline) to the “Buy [keyword] now” button.

It’s about playing with content elements to tell new arrivals to your site that they’re in the right place. Content elements such as:

• headings and subheadings
• links
• calls to action
• case studies and testimonial blurbs
• and, of course, body content.

If you’re the type who’s happy to keyword-stuff your copy because you don’t think anyone will read it, then do us all a favor: just delete it.

Instead, write something that’s useful for all prospective customers—including those coming through search who don’t know where they’ve ended up.

How well does your website content meet this goal? Do you think SEO can help you communicate with prospective customers and users? Let us know your position on SEO in the comments.

Last week, we saw how interface text can impact your brand, and your business, on the most basic level.

This week, let’s get a bit deeper into that topic by looking at one of the main text-related problems that online businesses—particularly startups—face.

What should we call this?

Developers play a big role in online product and service development. But often, they’re not the best people to think about what elements of the product or service should be called.

Why not? Well, the names you give to aspects of your service should be tied to your brand. Since brand probably isn’t your developers’ main concern, someone else might need to take the initiative on this.

Let’s look at an example: Mailchimp’s features page. Mailchimp’s tagline is “Easy email newsletters”. They’re not targeting advanced users—the service is pitched at the mass market. And the features page provides a pretty clear description of what’s included in the service.

One of the reasons it’s so clear is the vocabulary Mailchimp have used. Subscribers are subscribers—they’re not customers, readers, or visitors. A signup form is a signup form, not a registration form, a subscription form, or anything else. A list is a list, rather than a mailing list, a subscriber database, or an email list.

This isn’t a happy accident. In creating this service description, Mailchimp have chosen to use easily understood terminology, and use it consistently.

Do you do that on your site?

Well, let’s look at a not-so-stellar example: 99designs’ How it Works page.

You might recall that 99designs was a disruptive startup that coined the term “crowdsourcing” back in the day. While the business has competition now, once upon a time design contests were an entirely new concept that no one (outside of the SitePoint Forums) had ever heard of before.

Accordingly, this page aims to explain the concept of “design contests”. But as you’ll see, it introduces a range of language that’s not clarified in the text:

• design package
• prize
• concept
• art work

Some of these terms have overlapping meanings: “design package” and “prize” are similar, for example. Also, for the layman, it’s hard to tell the difference between “concepts”, “your favorite design”, “the final design”, and “original artwork”.

99designs is in the process of improving this information, so we can expect it to become clearer in future. But the point is obvious: the names you give to aspects of your service, and the consistency with which you use them, is critical to customers’ and prospects’ understanding of what you do.

Getting it right

How can you make sure your site or app doesn’t fall prey to the same mistake?

The first thing to do is look at your brand. 99designs is about design contests. Cool.

The next thing to do is look at the main elements of the service your brand offers or entails. For 99designs, that includes things like contests, designs, designers, prizes, and so on.

Once you have a list of these key terms, jot down all the words that you won’t use in their place. You’re probably already using these synonyms in your interfaces or text on marketing and help pages. For the quick list we just made, the expanded list might look like this:

• design contests, not competitions, design projects, challenges
• designs, not concepts, pitches, mockups
• designers, not creatives, team members
• prizes, not packages, winnings, cash

This isn’t to say the words that come later on each line here can never be used—when you’re talking about a design mockup, by all means use that word. The point here is that this list—which becomes your brand vocabulary, and central to your company style guide—tells you which words to use where.

Consistency counts

Remember the Mailchimp and 99designs examples, and you’ll remember that consistent terminology really does matter when it comes to getting your message across—especially if your idea is first to market, or a new concept for your target audience to grasp.

Use terms consistently, and through repetition, they’ll be more likely to stick with your audience. Those people will more easily be able to pick up the meanings of those terms, and remember them. A strong brand vocabulary makes for clearer communication, which reduces friction and the learning curve, and encourages swifter uptake of your service by your target users.

Of course these aren’t just a bunch of words—they’re key elements of your service offering. Elements that, as in the case of 99designs, truly are part of your unique selling proposition. So don’t leave brand vocabulary to your developers to create as they go. This is worth your spending a little time on up front so you can ensure that your marketing pages, autoresponders, press releases, social updates, and blog posts all use the same terminology.

Next time, we’ll see how you can build on the communication muscle you’ve built into your brand vocabulary by applying it across your site, then use everything you have to communicate with users on their terms. In the meantime, let me know if you have anything to add—or any questions—in the comments.

How’s your site’s bounce rate? How many of the people who downloaded your app ever actually use it? What’s the comment rate like on your company blog?

If your answers to these questions are less than stellar, you might have a problem.

A problem with words.

The hidden hurdle

Every one of us can string a sentence together. In many cases online, sentences aren’t even needed: we can all type “Buy now” or “Log in” onto a button or “Click here” into a link.

When most people think of web writing, they think of long copy for informational pages, ebooks and emails.

What they don’t consider is interface text.

Interface text is the words that tell people what to do on your pages: what your site or app does, and how they can access those features. Think: orientating sentences, descriptive text, links, buttons, menus and labels.

Text directly influences the interactivity, functionality and usability of interfaces. I’d go so far as to say it’s as important as design.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s take my theory for a spin.

See for yourself

If there’s one thing the web is great for, it’s setting a trend. Just as there are trends in design and development, there are trends in interface text.

One example is the humble Get Started button. Ten years ago, Get Started wasn’t a popular CTA—people were still focused on Click Here and Buy Now.

But today, Get Started is the go, particularly as a call to action for what the press loves to call “disruptive” online services—Learnable and 99designs are just two examples.

However, as Tweaky recently discovered, even a straigthtforward, concise Get Started CTA isn’t necessarily as clear as it could be.

Following professional advice, they tweaked Tweaky.

Three out of the four changes Tweaky made to their site were text-based. They didn’t change layout, imagery or even IA. All they did was change wording in three places on the site, and increase the color contrast on the Chat tab.

Wiht regard to their primary call to action, they added a caption so users will know what happens when they click.

The results? Conversions increased by 43%.

As Tweaky found out, a few little words can make a big difference to a site’s conversions.

But that particular solution demands extra reading and attention from users. Is that the best option?

Other examples from around the web—Create your store now, Register, Create your free account, Search, Log in, Buy now—show that there’s a lot of variety in terms of common CTAs.

Which one do you want to use on your site?

Is it time you focused on the hidden hurdle?

In the coming weeks, we’ll be looking more closely at a range of interface and usability-related text issues that digital developers, designers, and entrepreneurs face—whether you realise it or not—every day.

The aim is to help you get a grip on the text-related issues that might be holding back your site, your app and, ultimately, your business.

If you have any specific questions you’d like to ask, tell us in the comments below.

Next week, we’ll see whether the way you talk about your offering is actually confusing site’s users, rather than educating (or even exciting) them. See you then.