Management and upkeep of client websites require more than fixing broken links and widgets. It involves grooming, pruning, and reinventing site content – over and over, like newspaper op-eds and front page news. Believe me – as a user, I never enjoy going to the same website and seeing the same header image, banner ads, rotating graphics, and more importantly, the same content. Copy is to personality as graphics is to physical appeal. In other words, copy plays a critical role in keeping a visitor interested, engaged, expectant – and turning a user experience into a conversion (i.e., a sales transaction, inputting information, signing up for a newsletter or email blast, or simply sharing a great experience with friends using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). That’s why it’s important to keep a consumer interested and loyal with five easy steps.

1. Write engaging copy – Whether your content is promoting your company, property, destination, hotel, retail store, or restaurant, it’s important to present information that is web-friendly, cohesive, factual, current, and grammatically correct. This may require hiring a copywriter or editor with attention-to-detail and a finesse for writing engaging content that will allure instead of bore users who organically search for and land on your site.

Provide unique, authoritative information that will teach the user something new and unique from everything else out there. For every restaurant website, there are about a million other slightly similar websites out there with even more similar functionalities, menus, images of visually stunning food photography, and ostentatious showcases of star chefs. What makes your web presence a little bit different and stand out so a user will choose your restaurant?

2. Optimize your site’s HTML tags (keywords, phrases, metatags) – Be as SEO-friendly as possible. Most users will end up on your site organically, based on your rank in search engine results in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and smaller search engines. Thus, it’s important to bulk up your metadata with as many relevant keywords, phrases, and metatags, or else search engines won’t list your pages high up in search results. It’s kind of like fluffing up your blog entry or tweet with 20 hashtags. #cool #blog #optimize #HTML #metatags #sounds #redundant #phrases

3. Refresh your content constantly. Update your content with fresh new tweaks, revisions, and changes routinely every few weeks. Hook users in with new deals, packages, and features, and keep them consistently interested. When a user starts to catch on that the website is no longer undergoing changes, he or she smells “death” and naturally navigates to another site or vendor. Prevent that from happening!

4. Add internal links. There are two reasons for this: 1) Google loves to have its search crawlers notice individual pages with internal links on your site. 2) Internal linking increases ranking of the site’s internal pages.

5. Include a call to action! Now! Using urgent, effective, and persuasive language, add an eye-catching button, widget, video, or link, or configure a transaction form, RFP, or contact us form that engages the user to the next step. A call to action is the elevator pitch and proposal made to a prospective client or interested user. As Paul Boag says, a call to action provides three things: “focus to your site”, “a way to measure your site’s success”, and “direction to your users.”