Contact Form vs. Email Address: Which One Is Better for Your Contact Page?
The contact page is one of the most important—and most overlooked—pages on your business website. It’s the place where site visitors make the final decision to either abandon your site (the easy choice) or reach out to you (the harder choice). So this page should be all about helping the prospect overcome inertia and take the next step. Does that mean making a phone call? Sending an email? Filling out a contact form? Obviously, this will vary based on your business. For a restaurant or hotel, a phone number is a must since you will have to answer time-sensitive questions about same-day reservations. But for many of the other businesses…
Small Copy, Big Impact: Writing Your Call to Action
Ever go to a big event, like a music festival or a food fair? You wait in line and present your tickets, and then…you freeze. Faced with multiple stages, stalls, or activities, you’re unsure where to start. In this scenario, you’ve already paid your admission fee, so this temporary glacial moment is no big deal. But when it happens to people who visit your website—who haven’t decided whether to spend their money with you—this indecision can spell the end of the sale. Even if your business doesn’t technically operate online, chances are you have an online presence. Restaurants take online orders, hotels have web-based reservation software, wedding venues schedule site…
Restaurant WordPress Plugins Made Simple
When I started my company website about two years ago, my only significant website experience was with Squarespace. So when I tried to dive into WordPress, there was quite the learning curve. I spent a ton of time scouring the internet, trying to figure out how to make my site behave. I’m still not a site building expert by any stretch. But I have picked up some knowledge over the past couple years from running my own WordPress site and blog. Since most restaurant and venue operators are also not site development experts, I’m sharing what I’ve learned about restaurant plugins and how you can use them to add extra functions to your…
Is a Button Bonanza Sabotaging Your Website?
Very recently, one of my lovely blogging and email marketing clients asked me to do an audit of the copy on her business homepage and product page. I was happy to help, so I hopped over to her website to see what I could see. As the page loaded, the clickable elements began to appear…and appear…and appear. This website, while very attractive, had no less than six clickable elements “above the fold” — aka before you start scrolling down the page. And that’s not even counting the navigation menu. Holy overwhelm, I thought. I know this brand. I know their product. And even I didn’t know where to look. There…
The Easy Guide to Search Intent
Just yesterday, a client asked me to write a blog post around a certain keyword. For the sake of example, let’s say it was wedding caterer Austin*. The client currently appears on page three of Google search results for that keyword, and they want to get up to page one. Now, this company is a Central Texas wedding caterer, and they have a strong website. So a well-optimized piece of content that focuses on that keyword should be able to get to page one. But when I got started, I ran into a snag regarding that keyword’s search intent. And it was a good reminder that not every keyword is…