Copy And
The marketing podcast where online service providers learn how to write copy that sounds like them, but converts BETTER.
I’m Sam Burmeister, your guide on this copy adventure. As a conversion copywriter & sales psychology expert, I learned the ‘right way’ to sell in my decade-long sales career.
Now, after spending the last 6+ years writing copy for hundreds of successful launches and helping dozens of entrepreneurs write better copy every week…I know what sells and what’s working in online business right now.
And what’s working is copy AND – Copy and messaging, design, strategy, navigating AI and more...
Together, we’ll put the pieces of the marketing puzzle together - and you will write copy that both serves AND sells.
Copy And
37. Copy, SEO, and a DIY Website Overhaul
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In this episode, Samantha shares what happened when she sat down with a friend and fellow local business owner to overhaul a DIY website that was costing her bookings. What started as a casual favor turned into a masterclass in what most small business owners get wrong when they build their own Squarespace site — and how to fix it without blowing a budget or hiring a full agency.
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Hi friends. Welcome back to Copy and the marketing podcast where I tell you how to write copy that sounds like you, but converts better. And I'm gonna tell you about a really fun project that I did recently. I joined a run club last summer and I met a local business owner there. And over the past year, we've become close friends and. Recently she asked me to take a look at her website. Now, I've been on her website before because I am a nosy Nelly, and I knew that her website sucked. She knew that her website sucked. But let's talk today about why it sucked and what we did to change it. Now I wanna be very clear before I get started that. Working on your website, me jumping in, sitting next to you and going into your Squarespace and making design and system changes is very far outside of scope for me, however, I wanna talk about this because one, I work on Squarespace in my own business, so it wasn't that far of a stretch for me to just help a friend out and two, because there was a lot of things that we learned by sitting down for those couple of hours and judging the heck out out of her website. That had a lot to do with copy and where a lot of my clients are before they work with me. So let's jump in. First things first, most of the people who work with me already have a website they have done. What my friend did, and we'll refer to her as Jessie for the sake of the conversation because I don't have her permission to share her stuff on the internet just yet. So we're gonna talk about Jessie and her website. And what Jessie did is she went online, got a Squarespace domain, paid for the business profile, and started running her business. Now she has been incredibly successful despite having a crappy online presence. What she did when she started her business is she started an Instagram. She started talking about things, word of mouth, and she did her best with what she had, which is what we all do when we start a business. If you don't have a small business loan of a million dollars from your rich uncle. It's hard to know where to start and how to like bootstrap yourself to a point where you're not spending a whole bunch of money on marketing but are still getting clients in the door. And that's what she's done. She is well liked and well known in our area. So what was crappy about her website? One, it is completely unfindable on Google. She is a permanent makeup artist, so she does things like microblading for eyebrows, permanent lip color. She does tiny tattoos. So she's well known in our area, but according to Google, she doesn't exist. You cannot search microblading, Northern California. You cannot search permanent lip color in our town. You can search tiny tattoos near me and have her come up on Google. So that's thing number one is she is completely unfindable, and there's two reasons for that. One, she doesn't have a Google for Business profile. Two. She has crappy SEO on her website because of a lack of copy, so we're gonna come back to that. Why else did it suck? Because it was not navigable. I have tried booking appointments with her before and ended up just texting her, and that's a problem because it takes up her time, it leaves a lot of room for error, and it means that what is the point of her website if it's not behaving as a salesperson for her? So when we logged into her Squarespace, here's what happened. As I looked at it and I said, why do you only have one page? Turns out there were a lot of pages, but they were embedded under Squarespace. She had links all over this page that were broken. And frankly, while some of the elements on her website were pretty, it wasn't clear that I was supposed to click on them. So again, I am a copywriter. I do not do web design. However, because I am super involved in what my clients are doing, I'm involved in design conversations. I am having strategic conversations, so I know how the website's supposed to work, even though typically for my clients, I'm the one doing all of the writing for them. I know how everything else works behind the scenes. So we did a couple of things. First of all, I had her go on Google and request a Google for Business profile that is in the works, and that is going to set the foundation for her being searchable when somebody moves to our town. We have a town where there's a lot of people. There's a military base here, there's a lot of hospitals here, so there's a lot of people who are moving here and then leaving a couple years later. There's a lot of transience. In our town. So there are people Googling services that they need. It's not just one of those towns where everybody knows everybody and everything is word of mouth. She needs this website to be working for her, so now she'll be able to be found on Google. Her next step here, and I want you to hear this, if you are not found on Google, especially if you're a local business, is her next step will then be to get people to leave her Google reviews. She has thousands. Of clients, she has hundreds of people who would gladly leave her Google Review. So then to help her build out her Google review profile or her Google for Business profile, she'll add photos, she'll add before and afters, and she will have other people leaving her reviews soon. So what's gonna happen then is when people search microblading eyebrows, Northern California or Our Town, it's going to come up. This is relevant to you even if you're not a local business owner, because when you have a Google for Business profile, Google likes you more. And when other people are Googling things, you are more likely to come up. So everybody needs a Google for Business profile. So that was the first thing that we did when we sat down. Then we looked at her website and we said, where are these things going when you're clicking on them? And we realized that her things were going from her website, URL, to having a bunch of slashes behind them. So your website, if you're listening to this, probably has something like your website.com/services/done for you. And that's how mine is set up. Or maybe you have slash blog slash and then insert blog title here. So you probably have two slashes in your URL. Each of those things after a slash is called a slug. So you might have one or two slugs maximum. Some of her things, because I think she tried to do SEO one time where like slash makeup slash California slash microblading slash tiny tattoos, it was a mess. The way that the site was designed was a mess. So we went in and we'd looked at it and we said. Jesse, what pages do you need? What are people looking at on this website? And she said, people wanna know what the services are, how I can book them. And sometimes people wanna know more about me. I said, great. So your website needs a homepage and about page, a services page, and probably a portfolio because she is in such a visual industry. So we mapped those out and erased all of her sub pages that had a million slugs after them, and we just started back at one. So she now has, and we wrote these, well, I started outlining them. I didn't fully write them. We were only hanging out for like two hours. But we created the skeletons for a home about services, portfolio pages, and a contact page. Now the contact page is interesting. And I want you to hear this because copy is again, is copy and you're listening to copy and podcast. So it's copy and website ecosystems, copy and writing copy around client feedback. So I created the contact page, not even thinking about it and she said, okay, so I like all of these pages. But I think people are gonna get really confused with contact. People don't wanna contact me, they wanna book with me. And I said, great. That is the benefit to getting client feedback and to implementing your voice of client research. So when people contact her, they're not saying, Hey, I'm reaching out to contact you. They're saying I'm reaching out to book with you. So she now has a booking link, so it is her website.com/booking instead of slash contact. So she's using client feedback on this new iteration of her website. So that's where we started Google profile, creating the pages and then making sure that the pages make sense to her audience. That was the starter pack for redoing her DIY website. Again, it's still pretty di iy, but at least now it's going to work for her people. Then on her homepage, previously she had a bunch of pictures. And like a couple of buttons, but they didn't look like buttons. And that was important because again, without any text on your homepage, people can't search words both in AI or on Google and find her because it was just a bunch of images and no photos. So what we did is we created an above the fold section that said the name of our town and what she did, so that once she is verified on Google, she will be more searchable, people will be able to search microblading, tiny tattoos, permanent makeup. Permanent freckles is another thing that she does. We didn't keyword load, but we wrote copy in a way that made it so that when a human reads that page, they know exactly what she offers and it can be scraped by the internet to help her qualify when people are searching for her. Because she's a local business, we also put her business address above the fold. And once she's verified on Google, we will link that address to her Google for Business profile so that it'll come up on Google Maps when people are clicking on it from her website. So it makes it very navigable for people visiting. So we did that above the fold, and then people visit her website for two reasons, either to book with her or we ended up adding a page. I forgot to mention this earlier. For before and aftercare because you have to prepare your skin and take steps after you get a permanent makeup tattoo, to make sure that her work lasts. So there's before and aftercare. So we also added that to her homepage. So when you look at her homepage, it now says permanent makeup and tiny tattoos in our town with the link to her. Google Maps. It will link to her Google Maps and a button that says Book now. Then immediately under that, it says already scheduled. Click here to learn more about before and aftercare, and then it will take her people over to her before and aftercare. Then it goes into an about section on her homepage. That says who she is and what she does. We use this space to also include a couple of keywords in her headings, and then it'll take her people over to her, about page. It also links to a schedule your appointment. So there are multiple opportunities throughout her website for her to increase her searchability with SEO headings and to give people the opportunity to book, because most of the time people just end up on her website wanting to book. So what am I saying here as I get 10 minutes into this story about what happened and how I helped a friend? 'cause this isn't about me. This is not even about my client. This is about you understanding the improvements that you can make to a do it yourself website to make sure that you are more Googleable and that your copy is working for you. So a couple of things here. We use client feedback not just to get voice of client on her website, but to grab things like testimonials and also making sure that we're speaking the client's language. So rather than contact, we said booking, we're also using what people are searching for to improve her SEO on her do it yourself website, we are making the booking process. Easier, and we are using the words that people are searching for to create headings and body paragraphs to make sure that she is searchable. Now, this sounds like an SEO rant and it's absolutely not because it's copy and SEO. It is copy and client feedback. It is copy, and just understanding your audience well enough to know what they need to hear to create a website that makes it easy for them to book. Because when she sat down, she said, Sam, my only goal with this is to make it easy for people to book with me so that they quit effing texting me. So we added in above the fold. We added in SEO, we added in pages that made it easy for people to book with her, and we created a Google for Business account. Like I said, most people. DIY their website first and then come to me for professional copywriting. Now my goal is I would love for Jessie to be at a point in her business where it makes sense for her to hire a copywriter, and we build out even more pages so that she has multiple portfolio pages and case studies and different things to help her increase her online presence. But what she needed right now was a very simple website. That gets bookings, makes her money, and saves her time. If you want your website to be easier to navigate, you likely. Need a strategic shift in your website, and I know that strategy is such a buzzword right now, like get a strategy session with me and it's like, well, what the heck do I get after a strategy session when you work with me and hopefully when you work with any copywriter, the strategy is baked in because I look at websites not just as a task. You can't just reach out to me and say, Sam, write me a website. And I say, great, and I send back a bunch of words a few days later. That's what AI is for. When you work with me as your copywriter, you get that full strategy built in. I ask questions like, what is the goal with this website? Because what she had originally asked me for is, I want it to be easy. Here's the website, and she expected me to change some words on her website that would just magically make it easier. Instead, we needed an overhaul, but thank goodness she came to me and asked. Because I don't have data points for you. I cannot say that she increased bookings by a million, gazillion percent after we hung out because we hung out three days ago, and it's impossible to get those results overnight. But what I will tell you is that this website is going to be much easier for people to book from. We are hiding her phone number, so people are not going to be texting her. And she will have the strategy baked in. And really, strategy is just another word for actions built in so that people can navigate her website and book with her. When you work with me, you get my full brain on your copy, and that's what you need to know. So if you are ready to work with me, you can reach out to me at nomadcopyagency.com/contact. Not slash booking because you don't just book with me. You do contact me and tell me a little bit about your project before we get on a phone call. This helps save you time and me time because we're not just getting on calls willy-nilly. We are having strategic conversations about what it is that you need, and I will only work with you if I'm sure that I can help you. If you simply wanna stay in touch, you can reach out to me on Instagram at Nomad.Copy. And if you're not quite ready for a full on project, you can get my brain on your copy for a couple hours with, can you write this for me? You can go to, can you write this for me.com and grab an hour or two of my time? I'm here to help you sell, and I think that the world is a better place when you sell more, when you have more money in your pocket to make more impact. I am here to make selling feel good, especially with the words you use on the internet. Until next week, I'll talk to you soon.