How Important is Unique Writing to Online Business?

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By Richard Lowe

Introduction

Unique writing is the most important component of your business’s online presence. It’s the glue connecting your website to your social profiles, emails, podcasts, YouTube channel, directory listings, and more. It’s what funnels your customers to the checkout page, or your leads to the data capture.

With the e-commerce frameworks available today, building a retail site is not difficult. WordPress is ideal for service providers or publishers. Once you have decided upon a framework, it’s easy to migrate in beautiful themes that will make your site look pro in no time. There are also many developers available for affordable customization alternatives, if your site needs a little something extra.

The challenge is filling in the themes with the content that best represents your business and pushes users towards conversions. It behooves every business owner to build an online presence that perfectly embodies their company, and that starts with the writing.

From the Writing, Comes Everything Else

As an owner, you know your business inside and out. You’ve learned the logistical challenges of your suppliers, you know the role of your employees, you know your customer base, and you certainly know your services or product line. When developing an online business presence, mapping out all aspects of your business is essential.

The natural conclusion is to start writing to begin the mapping process. Once the writing starts, then new ideas come and you begin to delve into the granular details. You imagine the images that would go well with a certain block on the homepage or a section of the About Us. A video concept will come to mind for an upcoming social post. A vision of the online representation of your business will become clear. From the writing, comes everything else.

First Impressions

Many companies don’t even have a physical presence anymore. Even for businesses where a physical presence is essential, (i.e., medical specialists, recreational facilities, and restaurants) their online presence is still the portal to their brick-and-mortar establishments.

Moving forward, the online presence of a business needs to mirror that of the physical store. It sets the ever important, first impression. Consumers will vet a business online before deciding to drive there. They search for coffee or a hotel on the fly with a maps app, and the effectiveness of Google My Business for local stores is remarkable.

Looking into the Future

If we look a little into the future, it’s not hard to see how the first impression set by a company’s online presence evolves even further. Imagine when virtual reality (VR) headsets are commonplace in nearly every home. VR programs walk people into a restaurant to get a feel for its atmosphere. Users will be able to pull up a classic looking menu to hover before them so they can deliberate over what to eat.

Online reviews and detailed descriptions of the restaurant’s design and food will be easy to pull up from a submenu. If you are thinking that means that unique writing becomes less important due to the visual representation offered by VR, even in virtual reality unique writing is essential.

Take a look above, at YouTube in VR. The description of this 360° live STP video is positioned on the left side. It stands out much more than when visiting YouTube on your laptop or phone. VR is truly proving the worth of a picture, but a user will only find and watch a video if the title, tags, and description have been optimized. The written word in VR depicts details that a video cannot, and helps search algorithms categorize and rank it.

What is Unique Writing and Why is it Important

I keep mentioning original, or unique writing. It’s important to define unique writing and why it’s important. Let me explain it this way; duplicate content is a copy-and-paste job and represents a big problem for the internet.

First of all, if the written content was published on someone else’s site first, there may be some serious copyright challenges. Second, how are search engines supposed to categorize pages if they are crawling the same data from page to page, site to site? Duplicate content hurts search rankings and puts a business in jeopardy of lawsuits.

To clarify, unique written content can be rewritten content. As long as a link to a curated article or video is provided, then it is fine to rewrite the general ideas of the article in context to how it applies to your business. But taking the time to write something original, each and every time, is very important.

How Writing Impacts All Aspects of Online Business

Creating an online operational structure with team management, messaging, and cloud-based storage applications, is a smart move. It means there are no more snow days. Employees will be able to efficiently work remotely when their child stays home from school or during work travel. In terms of operations, writing detailed standard operating procedures is the key to remote team management.

The Pandemic Permanently Changed Business

The pandemic only helped to strengthen the internet’s essential role in business. It did not just impact consumers and sales; it has also affected business operation and structure. Ask yourself, during the pandemic:

How many people became much more comfortable shopping online while stuck at home?
Did employees become more efficient at working remotely during the disaster?
How many employers learned how to manage teams from their laptop?
Are business owners wondering how much they could save each year if they no longer need office space?

Once normalcy returns, statistically, less people will venture out to do their shopping than before the pandemic. Billboards, shopping mall banners, and convenience store end caps will be less valuable. Online advertising, providing the best user experience, and creating the most efficient funnel possible to increase conversions, are the smartest places to focus marketing efforts moving forward.

A Messy Online Presence is Unprofessional

No shopper is interested in spending money in a place that looks unprofessional. They are afraid of being ripped off, receiving poor quality items or services, and too many challenges if a dispute arises. Professionalism is what indicates to them that this is a safe place to spend their money.

When online, consumers are impatient. They see grammatically incorrect and confusing writing as a sign of a careless unprofessional business. They have too many options to wait on slow load speeds, or deal with confusing branding. It’s the online equivalent of a dirty, disorganized, back alley physical store.

Reviews

Consumers also rely on reviews to decide whether they are looking at a reputable business. And consider this, of the people looking at reviews, 82% of consumers look at the negative reviews.

Doesn’t it make sense to write a response to a negative review then? Replying that you are sorry to hear that the customer had a bad experience, that you want to fix it for them, and that you appreciate their feedback, let’s everyone reading the negative review know that the business cares and is actively working to improve.

While there are many factors to consider when designing and maintaining your online presence, professional up-to-date writing is the most important. With reviews, writing is the principle way to manage business reputation.

Writing for Customers and Search Engines

Business writing of today has taken on a whole new level of technicality. Not only are best practices in traditional copywriting still important, but you need to write SEO titles, SEO descriptions, and metas for images. Proper linking and heading structures, not just for the reader, but for the search algorithms crawling a site’s pages as well, is a must.

Take this article as an example. I have written it to be evergreen, meaning that it should still have value to readers for years to come. But considering the nature of the piece, I am not interested in linking to any reference articles that have not been updated in the last year or so.

In my Google searches, I purposely looked at the dates at the beginning of each page description before even thinking about clicking. I also care about the domain authority (DA) to tell me the link has SEO value and that the site is generally well liked.

Let’s dive into some of the technicals details for both SEO and the customers. We will start with SEO.

Writing and SEO

That leads me to the importance of being noticed by search engine algorithms. Writing is not just for potential clients, it’s for the search algos too.

How does unique writing help google rankings?

- Consistent new original writing helps improve your site’s overall domain authority over time.
- It provides new opportunities to integrate keywords and increase their ranking over time.
- It creates opportunities for search engines to pick up new critical keywords and spurs more frequent page crawls.
- Engaging writing may capture your readers for longer, keeping them on the page and reducing the bounce rate.
- It provides opportunities for new internal and external linking.

I once told a print magazine editor, that asked me what I do for a living, that I write for both people and algorithms. He just gave me a blank look. I think that merits a deeper explanation into the value of SEO.

The Merits of SEO

Search engines have been around for decades, and so it surprises me that many business owners still do not see the value of SEO. I even had an accountant once tell me that SEO was all smoke and mirrors.

Algorithms are a series of, if this, then thats. No smoke and mirrors. No trickery. I think the problem is that too many online marketers charged over-the-top fees and over promised results for far too long. They did not set proper expectations, and their clients did not get the ROI they thought they were going to receive.

Algorithms have set parameters which digital marketers consistently work to decipher. It’s obvious that keyword rankings are not happening at random.

Understanding SEO doesn’t take an in-depth knowledge of coding. It takes looking closely at the top ranking pages of competitors to see what they have done to get ranked on the first or second page of search engine result pages (SERPs). SEO works, but it does take patience and follow-through before the sales from organic traffic become a top key performance indicator (KPI).

Even though ads are securing more top spots on SERPs, the organic traffic a business gets from Google searches remains an essential component of a business’s overall revenue stream. Even if organic traffic is not yet an important KPI for a company, employing SEO strategies will help a company become data driven, and eventually the traffic will begin pouring in.

Now, let’s review what customers are looking for in writing.

Writing and Customers

I continuously research developments in search engine updates. My overall impression is that the developers of these search engine algorithms strive to make the algorithms rank results based on what the users would like to see.

So, a general rule of thumb is that if you have produced a written piece that a member of your targeted audience would like, then search engines will like it too.

What does your targeted audience like?

- Readability
  - They want to be able to easily and quickly navigate to the part of the article that is most relevant to their immediate needs. That means a well-organized heading structure to easily identify the sections that are most important to them. A clickable table of contents is always nice too.
- Well Written Articles
  - Making sure your articles flow well for the reader with good segues and conclusions keeps them reading. Making sure the writing is grammatically correct, and not full of jargon and non-standardized abbreviations, expresses to the reader that a business cares about the customer above all else. It leaves the impression that the company is run by well educated professionals that take time to provide quality.
- Conversational Articles
  - If an article reads like a manual, then it will be tough to keep users reading. Writing should not be too casual, but it should certainly have elements of relatability to them. Adding a dash of creativity to writing is like adding seasoning to a recipe.

Since readers seem to like these components of writing, then so does Google and other search engines. The algorithms actually look for conversational tones in articles when crawling a post or page as a ranking factor.

Conclusion

Tom Stoppard, the famous playwright, said,

“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

I would argue that, these days, words in the right order do a lot more than just nudge. Today, they can be the key to driving nearly all of your sales, making them essential to e-commerce.

It doesn’t matter if you sell inexpensive or high-end products. It doesn’t matter if you sell landscaping services or you are a medical doctor. Words represent your business online. If you care about growing your business’s revenue stream, reputation, or its impact on the world, then recognize the importance of unique writing.

richard@h1writing.com

I worked in the financial sector for 14 years as a broker and then an IAR. I not only learned about investing, but also about a wide variety of business models. With a degree in journalism and a love of writing, I started ABMJL LLC, an online marketing company, in 2017. It focused its services on the burgeoning legal cannabis industry. ABMJL eventually evolved into H1 Writing Services.