5 Copywriting tips to improve your website
So often I see websites where you can’t really tell what the business or person does for you. Result? Missed opportunity to convert a visitor into a lead or a customer. In other words, your website is selling you short and you need to improve it.
What I see a lot is flowery descriptions about businesses like, “We are a collective of creative who strive for blah blah blah”. Which sounds great. But what does that mean for their website visitor?
The other thing I see a lot is super funky design that is so cool that (again) I can’t really tell what the business does for me.
So today’s post is kind of an intervention for your website. It’s time you took a good look at it and made it work for you.
Here are my 5 top copywriting tips to help you out:
1. Make it easy for visitors to quickly see what you do
Like the Live video I recently shared on Facebook, don’t ‘we’ all over your customers. Tell them what you do for them instead.
From a navigation point of view, make it easy to find your services, testimonials and what makes you unique and better than your competition (I recommend some healthy competitor analysis when designing and writing your site).
Your home page needs to tell people what you do for them and why they should use you, preferably as the first things they see. To back this up, marketing statistics tell us that 55% of people view a page for 15 seconds or less.
To quickly and clearly show people what you do for them:
- Keep your copy brief and to the point, and use your page layout to draw attention to the copy,
- Use copy that focuses on the benefits of what you do for your target market,
- Speak to that person, using the right tone of voice, and
- Know what your value proposition is and tell people.
2. Talk the right way, to the right people
There’s no point laying out and writing your website in formal, professional tones if your target market doesn’t communicate that way… because your target market will be pretty unlikely to choose you.
To really nail your website (or any marketing really) you need to clearly identify your target market. Who are they? Be specific.
I recommend using an Avatar or Brand Persona to get really specific. And it works – as you’re writing copy, imagine you’re talking to that person.
By really knowing your target market you can talk to them using the words and tone of voice that they’ll connect with. Result: the right people will be interested in your business.
3. Set a goal or focus for each page
Let me just say it right here: building a website can be hard. There’s not only the design elements but also the copy.
Trust me, I get it. Sometimes you just want to get the darn thing finished. So you go ahead and use a great designer, write good copy, and get it finished, but it’s missing something…
Each page of your site needs to have a focus or goal. What do you want your visitor to do when they view the page? Some examples are: contact you, download a resource, sign up to your newsletter, or click on a ‘call to action’.
The opposite of this, which is also confusing, is having too many calls to action on one page. It kinds of feels like shouting from a visitor point of view, “sign up here”, “buy now”, “get your free download”… you get the picture.
Actually – just going off on a bit of a tangent here. Does anyone else really not like pop up forms or auto-play videos or is that just me? Please, think about what bothers you from a website visitor point of view and don’t subject your visitors to it.
The point is (sorry about the tangent): make sure when you’re writing or rewriting copy for each page, you have a goal or objective in mind.
4. Don’t overwhelm visitors with too many words
Have you ever seen a website which is covered in paragraphs and paragraphs of text, just glazed over and clicked ‘x’?
If your website is covered in lots of paragraphs, you need to break thatinto manageable sections or chunks.
Using headings, bullet points, shorter paragraphs and designing with sections helps your reader out and cuts out the overwhelm.
Please, don’t make it hard for people to find out why they should buy from you by burying the reasons in long paragraphs.
5. Set your SEO up correctly
Everyone wants to be on page 1 of search engines; SEO is a science with a lot of elements to it.
But guess what? Getting your website set up with great keywords, meta titles and meta descriptions will help boost your search engine rankings.
In short, you need to:
- Research and find the right keywords to suit your business
- Select a particular keyword for each page
- Use that keyword throughout your page content
That content includes your page headings and copy, along with meta title and description.
Search engines want to make sure their visitors have a good experience (aww!). So the search engine needs to be able to ‘crawl’ your site and confirm that the keyword you’ve selected is in fact what your page is about.
If this all sounds a bit confusing, check out my recent Facebook Live for some quick SEO copy tips including meta titles and descriptions.
So that’s it, my 5 tips / website copy intervention. It’s worth the time to invest to get the best result out of your website and convert visitors into customers.
If you need some help with your website (or as some of my clients say, they, “suck at writing”), I’m here to help. Check out my services page for more details.
