What about search engines?

Optimizing sales letters is quite a difficult process and it's something that many people ignore when they set up a site to sell their product. The purpose of a sales letter is to sell a product, not to get traffic. Therefore, they should be written in a way that specifically targets sales. This can often mean that search engine friendly parts of a page are not targeted. So, what should you do?

The simple answer is that you should not change a sales letter to try to please search engines. If you were to do that, you may end up getting more traffic but less sales. Getting phrases that people search for into a sales letter may detract from it's overall message and this will often prove to be case if you try to get keywords into key parts of a page.

Popular marketing wisdom would suggest that your headline is single most important part of a sales letter. Unfortunately, it's also quite an important factor for search engines. The first paragraph or two of a sales letter are also very important because they can almost close sale on their own if you grab people's interest. Again, unfortunately first paragraph or two of a page are quite important to search engines.

If you were to write an article, you could get keywords into headline and first paragraph because they relate to article. With a sales letter, using keywords that relate to product may not be appropriate because you aren't providing information as such - you are selling something.

Another issue with sales letters is that they do tend to be quite long. Therefore, if you are worried about keyword density, this can cause a problem. Not that you should worry about keyword density too much but it is an issue. If you were targeting a two word phrase, you may have to mention it 100 times or more on your page to get right density. Let's face it, there is a good chance that your letter may look a bit weird if you did that.

Now, there are two methods that you could consider using to get traffic from search engines. The second one that I discuss here is my personal favorite but using either will have an effect.

Optimize Your Letter

There are areas of a page that are important to search engines but will not change overall effectiveness of your sales letter. Therefore, these parts need to be highly optimized to give you best chance of success - considering other important factors will largely be ignored.

Page Title: It is very important that you have a concise and targeted page title. When people visit your sales letter they may well look at page title in their browser but it is your headline that will catch their attention. They won't look at title and say "Nope, not for me". They'll be happy if title is a short phrase that matches up with what they were looking for and so will search engines.

Keyword Density & Positioning: You can improve keyword density of a page by including it in bulleted lists, quotes and highlighted areas. Often, people will put a key part of their sales letter in a box or highlight it to reinforce point. This is where you can get a few keywords in. After an important paragraph in your letter, you can either re-state information or re-word it. Make sure you get keywords in here. It's very important that this is obviously an important point for your reader's benefit. Just re-stating something in another normal paragraph will look strange.

How to determine best avenue

Typically, businesses rely on stats provided by PPC companies, but usually this isn't good enough. Sure, if you only advertise in Google AdWords or Overture this method may be sufficient, but what if you advertise with more than one PPC company or you advertise on banners, email and pop-ups/pop-unders also?

The solution is tracking. The only way to know if one of your avenues is performing better than another is to track users and determine where all buyers/leads are coming from.

For example, say your candle company advertises in Google AdWords and on Overture for key phrase "scented candle" and you receive, according to Google and Overture combined, 300 visitors, and from your own records 20 orders per day.

Without tracking users at most you know that google gave you 120 visitors and Overture gave you 180 visitors (remember this is an example), times that users visited your website and of course that you received 20 orders for that day.

With tracking you would still know all of above information, however you would also know even more vital information like that out of 180 visitors that overture gave you, 18 of your 20 orders came from them. You would also know (depending on how detailed tracking was) what pages they looked at and if they have previously visited your site, among many other things.