I sent this email to one of our web design clients. The site was a bilingual English and Japanese site. It wasn’t the best email I have ever written but I thought it summarized my feelings about the importance of good content and increasing conversions….

Thank you for your mail. There are two things I try to keep in mind is that the company’s material is very familiar to someone in the company, but for the outsider they might understand quickly what you mean. If you meet them face to face you can see they do not understand by their body language, but online you will never know. People will quit the site, if they do not understand within about 8 seconds. Marketing online is very brutal, it has to be very very good just to have a chance to have them contact you.

With our PEK site, everything is very familiar to us. All the terminology in the site, we use everyday but sometimes site visitors do not understand what we are talking about because they are not familiar with these terms (SEO, SEM, PPC, RSS, etc). So we had a non PEK person that is a proofreader go through it and made changes and recommendation so that an ordinary person would understand our text as well as a web professional. I think it is easier to read now and people can see the benefit immediately on each page. Our site needs a lot more work but we are trying to improve it each week (just like our competitors do). My mother is a property manager and manages huge budgets, tens of millions of dollars. I often call her and ask her to read a new page on our site and tell me what it means. If she can’t answer quickly, I know other business mangers won’t understand it either and we need to rewrite it if we have any chance to sell that product or service.

There are a lot of terms on [your] website, which I have no idea what it means, which is ok if there is another place on the site for me to read about some benefits and features for non [this kind of products] engineers. But now there is no place for that. The home is more of a history of the [product] and the company rather than a benefits statement telling me about the ROI of the product, how I will save money, save the Earth, etc. I think it would be wise to have a good proofreader, that not only understands engineering but can explain it to non engineers, go through the site.

Also some of my Japanese friends read the Japanese site and said it was hard to read or a little boring. So it might need a proofread by a non [company] member in Japan too to make it easier to read for non engineers, for example business buyers. I am not sure if [the boss] has someone he is working with for marketing advise in [the city], maybe they can recommend someone with experience or success writing online. The reason is again that most web users will only give a site 8 seconds before deciding to stay or go, so the text needs to be really good.

There is a really good book about writing for the websites, called Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy by Nick Usborne. You might want to pick it up and give it a read as you travel. Then just keep practicing rewriting content the homepage. As the content improves, you will see that the time spend on the site will increase (Google analytics has that stat) as people become more interested in the product. I know you are very busy so it might be a lot of investment of time but marketing online requires it.

I hope this is helpful.

Thank you,

Jeff