Proofreading Tips to Make Your On-site Content Lead Generation Friendly

What makes a killer landing page? Great visuals, engaging content and a fantastic call to action. While it may sound cut and dry, a lot of hard work and attention to detail are required. Of course, the end result is to convert a website user. In order to do that, though, let’s take a look at one of the most important aspects of any company’s website: on-site content. Here are six simple but effective proofreading tips to boost your content quality, making it lead generation friendly.

1. Befriend the Thesaurus

Starting a sentence with “We” or “Our Company” three times in a row is cause for alarm. Look for ways to vary your sentence structure, and also use a thesaurus from time to time. This helps breathe new life into the content. For example, saying “well-being” 10 times in a landing page is repetitive. Consider synonyms like health, comfort, happiness, prosperity, etc. Otherwise, a reader may focus more on the content’s redundancy than on the content’s message. If the reader is already bored, he/she will likely leave the website, fast.

2. Eliminate Excess Prepositions

I mentioned this in an earlier post, but your company will look and sound more professional when you eliminate prepositions like up, off, in, out, etc. For example:

“Our company is backed up by more than 30 years of experience.”

Instead, eliminate “up” and say: “Our company is backed by more than 30 years of experience.”

3. Make Sure Your Keywords are Consistent

When strategically placing keywords into your content, they need to be spelled the same — this helps safeguard credibility and professionalism. At Straight North, we frequently fight this battle with content creation. Confirming if a keyword is hyphenated, one word, two words, capitalized, lowercase, the list goes on and on. Your keywords should not only be consistent on one landing page, but all website pages. For an easy way to double check keyword spelling, type the phrase in question into your Google search bar.

For example, if I wanted to search for the phrase “Internet marketing company” in Straight North’s website. I would use the following formula:

“keyword phrase” site:website URL

… it would look like this: "Internet marketing company" site:www.straightnorth.com

By doing this, I have an easy way to confirm if a keyword or phrase is consistent or not.

4. Don’t Keyword Stuff

In the same vein, avoid using the same keyword phrase — let’s use “homes in Chicago” as an example — too many times in a landing page. Use the words/phrases strategically. Does it look natural? Does it make sense? By using common sense and variations, you can prevent “spammy” content.

5. Avoid Excessive Exclamatory Sentences

Unless you’re trying to emphasize a point, use exclamation points sparingly! (Pun intended.) While enthusiasm is a great way to engage prospects, over use can become a turn off.

6. Eliminate “Junk” Words

Words/phrases such as actually, really, basically, quite, stuff, etc. don’t do anything to enhance your content. Basically, they actually don’t really do much of anything. You can likely eliminate all of these words and your sentences will be tighter and more effective.

By utilizing these six proofreading tips, your on-site content will become even better, hopefully gaining the attention of new, quality leads.