The digital marketplace isn’t kind to below-par websites, with the process of natural selection soon weeding out the laggards — and the standards get higher in a hotly-competitive environment like Melbourne. Since it’s the world’s most liveable city, it’s no surprise that businesses are clamouring eagerly to establish themselves as area favourites.
And while there are plenty of factors that differentiate websites, content quality always has a major role to play. You can carefully tune the loading times, polish the animations, and have hundreds of unique pages, but it won’t help much if you’re getting the content basics wrong.
In this piece, we’re going to look at 5 distinct content elements and highlight a separate Melbourne business for each one. Let’s get started.
Blog: Calibre
As a clothing store, Calibre stocks roughly what you’d expect with excellent presentation, but its blog is a particular standout. Split by default into “HOW TO” and “CAMPAIGNS” sections, each one does exactly what it’s supposed to: the former covers a range of practical guides on everything from wearing leather jackets to choosing a matching tie, and the latter keeps the text copy to a minimum while focusing on embedded videos and images.
What Calibre clearly understands is that a blog needs to serve a purpose. Instead of providing general updates on the business or unoriginal commentary pieces, it sticks to actionable posts that have natural ranking potential by virtue of answering frequently-asked questions.
Product Descriptions: Boost Juice
The best thing about the drink descriptions on the Boost Juice website is that they’re pointedly dissimilar to what you might reasonably anticipate. Comestibles and scented products (anything sensory, really) tend to attract purple prose in the form of rich and flowery sales rhetoric, and it can work well, but often it simply feels generic. Not so with the Boost Juice descriptions.
Instead of text chunks, you get attractive and energetic visuals that sprout around your cursor as you browse — and when you click on a product, you get ingredients and nutrition information. That’s it. There’s really no need for any persuasive language, because all the persuasion is handled by the visuals.
Title Tags: Patricia Coffee
Let’s mentally revise the word “tags” to “tag” here, because the Patricia Coffee has just one title tag… because it has just one page. And there isn’t much to it. But that’s really the key of title tags when it comes to SEO and usability in general. There’s no great artistic ceiling for title tags, and you’re not going to win sales purely through innovative titles — it’s all about nailing the basics, and that’s exactly what we have here.
The title is “Patricia Coffee Brewers | Cnr Little Bourke & Little William St. Melbourne”. It covers the name of the business (which features the nature of the business) and the location, and that’s all it needs to do. The page itself features map, Twitter and Tumblr links alongside opening hours, and nothing more. Since it’s a business that stands or falls on its reputation and word-of-mouth buzz, all it needs to do online is be findable. Job done.
Meta Descriptions: No35 Restaurant
If your website manages to rank in the middle of numerous options, having a great meta description can give it the edge it needs to earn a click, but quite often Google simply chooses not to use meta descriptions because it feels it can do better. Well, when I found the No35 Restaurant in Google, it had exactly the description listed on the page — no surprise, because it’s completely solid: “No35 restaurant offers sophisticated modern dining surrounded by contemporary artwork and breathtaking views of Melbourne CBD”.
It covers everything important: the name of the business, what it provides, and the context in which it provides it. Perhaps most important, it doesn’t try too hard. It doesn’t implore the reader to try the business or offer any deals that wouldn’t really fit an upmarket restaurant. It simply and confidently confirms what you likely already expected.
Style: Style Sourcebook
The concept of style may have a lot of intangible elements, but it’s easy enough to spot style when it’s present — and while the name may be something of a hint anyway, I think it’s more than fair to say that Style Sourcebook lives up to it.
What I really like about Style Sourcebook is the way in which it combines negative space (very important for ecommerce — take a look at the top Australian business listings and you’ll see a lot of white spacing) with a modular feel. The hero image products jostle around as you move the cursor, and the lead mood board feature lets you drag, drop and resize products to create a unique arrangement you can use for inspiration. Those arrangements then get featured on the site for others to see, ingeniously bringing in user-generated content to keep things fresh.
Conclusion
These 5 websites from Melbourne-based businesses use content very well but in entirely different ways. It really goes to show that there’s no one set formula for making a great website — it’s all about finding the best to implement best practices while maintaining a unique flair that sets you apart.
About the Author:
Victoria Greene is a freelancer writer who lends her ecommerce marketing expertise to businesses and websites across the globe. She loves talking about online retail almost as much as she does engaging in it. You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce.
