No matter what industry you’re in, you probably use a lot of terminology that your clients may not be familiar with. From industry jargon to complex medical terms; to the formal names of products and techniques; you likely have a very different way of explaining your business than your potential clients do.
The problem is: prospective clients can’t find you online because you’re not speaking the same language.
The key to writing your website copy in such a way that you can easily be found by prospects searching for you is to think like a client. For example, an ear, nose and throat doctor would commonly define their practice by those terms (ear, nose, throat); while a person searching for them would commonly use words like ‘allergy’, ‘sinus’, or ‘hearing’. A heating/cooling technician may refer to his services as HVAC repair, while his prospective clients are searching online for “air conditioning repair”. Although two phrases may have exactly the same meaning, search engines will only return results that use the same words and phrases.
The next time you sit down to write a blog post or a page of copy for your website, ask yourself: “how would my client say this”. You may find that you’ll need to incorporate actual questions into your headlines, or reword entire sections of copy. But the closer your copy matches the exact phrases being typed into a Google, Yahoo, or Bing search, the stronger your performance will be, in search engine rankings as well as conversions from new site visitors.