How to Write Good Web Copy
Are you losing business because you don’t have a website? Are you not sure how to write the text for the site and have therefore put off having a site built for your business? It is a fact that potential customers are logging on to the World Wide Web because it is convenient and fast, however internet users are quick to dismiss a business that has a poorly written website, or indeed no website at all. Websites can be an extremely powerful tool for your business. You can reach out to millions of potential customers for as little as a few hundred euros; however it is imperative that your website is well thought out and has a defined structure to it. To engage your potential customers with your web copy you need to provide concise information about your business, in a format that is both well written and is easy to read. To write effective web copy you have to understand what your potential customers are looking for. The majority of customers initially want to know the following: What product or service does your business offer? Where is your company located? What does your product or service cost? What benefits do your products or services offer them? Why should they choose your product or service? How can they contact you? This sounds simple, yet it is in the way you present the information that could make the difference between a customer bringing his business to you or moving onto a competitor.
In order to produce effective copywriting you must consider the following: 1) What benefits does my business offer and how will I deliver these benefits? 2) Do I have a unique selling position and how do I optimise this? 3) How personal should my text be? 4) How do I optimise my text for the search engine spiders? BenefitsGenerally websites are about selling, be it a product or a service. Your customers want to know what you can do for them. It is therefore important to describe your product or service in terms of benefits for your client, whilst at the same time explaining how you, as a business, will deliver those benefits.
A good way of doing this is to state specific, and indeed special, features of your product or service, such as availability, price and any known areas of competitor weakness. Doing this concisely and methodically will help support your claim to be able to deliver benefits to your clients.
Unique Selling Position
Do you have a unique factor that sets you apart from the competition? If so, use it. Make a statement of 2 or 3 sentences stating why you are different from everybody else and put it on your home page. You want this to be the first thing that people see when they land on your site.
How personal should my text be?
Writing in an informal or personal style is popular; however care must be taken not to sound overly familiar. It can be off putting for potential clients if you appear gushing and try to be everybody’s best friend.
Text should be friendly and welcoming, but at the same time professional and factual. Try to write in a style that differentiates you from other businesses without losing your message.
Optimisation
Having decided what you’d like to say, it’s time to decide how to say it and how to optimise your text for the search engines. The words you use can make or break a site; follow these tips for effective copywriting: 1) Opt for strong verbs over weak ones. 2) Always use the active voice over the passive. 3) Remember you are not writing to impress, you are writing to communicate effectively. 4) Don’t fall into the trap of padding out text by waffling; you will only bore your visitors and they will move on. Keep your sentences simple and snappy. 5) Proof read your writing for grammatical errors. Errors in web copy give the impression of being unprofessional. 6) Include targeted keywords in your content that allow the search engines to find your site. Also include these keywords in your meta tags. Search engine optimisation is a constantly shifting landscape. Making use of popular search terms within your text will assist the search engine robots in determining the relevance of your content, thus placing it accordingly within the returned results. More information on Search Engine Optimisation can be found in our ‘Guide to Search Engine Optimisation’ article.
