CRAP. It’s the mantra for designers, and one that brings on as many confusing glances as their references to Lorem Ipsum do (if you’re curious).
But author Robin Williams’ four major design principles—Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity—are too valuable to remain an insider secret. In fact, if copywriters look closely enough, they can uncover a few gems of sound advice to use for their own art.
So, pilfer away, writers. Here's how you can take the four design principles and use them to feel the power of CRAP in your SEO writing.
CONTRAST normally refers to creating a striking difference between two objects so that each stands apart. But writers don’t normally deal with “objects.” Their contrast has to come into play in the words, sentences and paragraphs they use to design a written piece.
Focus on writing sentences that contrast in length to keep readers engaged. Also try contrasting paragraph length. Header and body text styles. The letter length of your words. Anything to keep your copy interesting, alive and easy to read.
REPETITION asks designers to reuse visuals throughout a design to reinforce consistency. For copywriters, this could translate into repeating language patterns. If your first bullet point starts with a verb, for example, don’t try to sneak in any starting adjectives when your verb choices run dry (and you thought no one was noticing).
Repetition in writing could also mean repeating the overall aim of the page in your call to action. For instance, if you’re writing a product page, ask people to buy rather than to “contact us today” in your call to action.
ALIGNMENT makes a design “work” visually. Objects are connected to each other via strategic left, right or center alignments.
Even though margins aren't an issue for most copywriters, it's still important to align SEO strategy with a client’s brand. While you’re editing, ask yourself if your writing “sounds like” your client. Does it support their mission? Tie into other pages on their website? Optimize with the company's purpose in mind to make your writing meaningful to a client.
PROXIMITY is the last design principle and one that deals with positioning. Related items should be grouped together; unrelated items should be separated.
As a copywriter, practice proximity by recommending that your “Read our free whitepaper” call to action be placed near the “Download our free whitepaper” button on a web page. Suggest that an image be moved if it clashes with other icons or buttons. A few simple suggestions is all it takes.
And there you have it, writers. Your own set of CRAP tools. Remember them in your next SEO assignment, and add any others you can think of here.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »Go Mobile With Your Pay-Per-Click Ads
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Is your boss not sold on SEO yet? Show her the value of this tried-and-true Internet marketing stalwart with these killer arguments.
Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2011
2-3 p.m.
Video is one of the most effective ways to reach your company’s audience online. Through online video marketing, you can engage and interact with customers, increase traffic to your website and add more personality to your social media networks.
Join Yvonne Rayburn, Director of Online Communications for Webbed Marketing, and me, Steve Kozak, Director of Video Production for Fathom Online Marketing, this Wednesday, August 24th from 2-3PM EST to learn how to best utilize video and social media to build brand awareness, expand your audience and connect with your customers.
In this webinar we will discuss:
• Tips for video marketing
• Utilizing video to increase traffic to your website
• Amping up your social media presence with videos or video contests
• Ways to make video more fun
• How to measure the effectiveness of your video marketing efforts
Don't miss out! Register for this fun and informative webinar today!
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »Did you know there are more than 750 million active Facebook users, and people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook? With the community growing as much as it has, Facebook advertising is growing exponentially every single day. According to The Financial Times, the price of advertising on Facebook has increased 74% since last year! With this drastic increase in average cost per click, more and more competition appears to be entering the Facebook space. Is your company missing out?
At Fathom, we have managed multiple Facebook advertising campaigns and have discovered some very good and very bad elements.
Let’s face it: Google AdWords is becoming more and more saturated with competition and your costs are going up. You’re working eagerly to try and optimize your quality score, find new keywords to bid on, test new landing pages, etc., but costs continue to rise. You might want to branch out and try Facebook Advertising to compare ROI.
Facebook offers many benefits over Google AdWords:
- Demographic targeting: Facebook gives you an extremely targeted way to reach your audience which does not involve bidding on individual keywords like Google
- Reach: According to Facebook.com, 70% of users are from outside of the U.S. This just puts into perspective that Facebook is just as popular out of the United States as inside of the US! No worries, though, if you want to reach a small audience, such as 10 miles within a DMA or a specific zip code, this can be done as well within Facebook.
- Brand awareness: While you can definitely generate leads and sales on Facebook, the main benefit from advertising on it is easy building of brand awareness. By targeting friends of fans, you can easily double or triple your amount of “likes” within weeks. Then the key is to continue to re-engage with these fans by promoting specials, news, and updates on your wall.
- Sales and Lead-Generation: Generating leads and sales on Facebook can be quite tricky. If you are trying to generate more sales, be sure to offer specials exclusively to Facebook members and track it separately than other marketing efforts. As far as generating leads, consider building a landing page within Facebook and testing it vs. sending users to a landing page with an external URL (outside facebook.com).
Just like any other pay-per-click advertising platform, Facebook could help improve your ROI by fixing several issues:
- Setting monthly budgets: Facebook currently only lets you set a daily budget, as opposed to a monthly budget. This can be an issue if you happen to be having a really good day as far as clicks go, and you run out of budget. If you were able to have your budget set at a monthly level, you would avoid potentially missing out on clicks, leads, or sales.
- Using ad scheduling: Unlike Google AdWords or Microsoft Adcenter, the Facebook advertising platform does not allow you to automatically turn off ads on certain days or during certain times. This is unfortunate, as you could be exhausting your budget very early on in the mornings when your best conversion rate happens to be later on in the day.
- Conversion tracking: It is impossible to tell which campaign/ad converts better within Facebook’s interface. In order to track conversions, you must use a 3rd-party tracking system, such as Google Analytics.
- Cannot a/b test images and ads within same campaign: Unlike Google, Adcenter, or even LinkedIn advertising, you aren’t able to a/b test ads or landing pages within the same campaign. You have to duplicate the campaign and targeting in order to test different elements, which can lead to a mess of campaigns that are difficult to manage.
Interested on advertising on Facebook or learning more about our Pay-Per-Click capabilities? Contact us today and receive a Free Online Marketing Assessment.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »Check out this week’s episode of “Fathom That?!” on mobile e-commerce, or m-commerce, in response to viewer Brian Greenberg, who requested more e-commerce optimization tips.
Matt Mesenger, Fathom’s E-commerce expert, invites Jonathan Levey, a mobile website specialist, to talk about how you can optimize your mobile website for e-commerce. You’ll learn 5 easy tips to maximize your e-commerce profits through mobile devices.
If you have something you’d like discussed in a “Fathom That?!” episode, please share that with us! And stay tuned for next week’s episode to learn more about online marketing.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »
