5 key tips for writing website copy

Have you ever had the pleasure of someone coming up to you at a networking event & spending ten minutes boring you to tears with the different services their company provides, telling you how many years experience they have, how many awards they’ve won….?

I’m guessing it didn’t enamour them to you. And yet that’s what so many of us do with our websites!!!

Of course we need to tell people what we do. But go back to face-to-face networking. If you’re good at it, you listen first, then you impart small chunks of RELEVANT information….hopefully with the result that the person you’re talking to will then want to know more.

Apply that to your website:

• Focus on your users. Focus on your users. I repeat. Focus on your users. It’s so important, so obvious, and gets missed so many times. Word your website text (particularly the first paragraph or so on your home page) so that it addresses the issues you know your clients & potential clients face. Keep on asking yourself the ‘so what?’ question. Do your readers care about whether you used to work for a multinational corporation? Probably not – what they will care about is whether you can take some headaches away from them, provide them with what they are looking for.

• Make it easy for people! If visitors to your site can’t find what they’re looking for straight away, they’re not going to hang around. Believe me. You have literally a few seconds to get and hold that person’s attention. Make sure you have a clear, well labelled menu structure. Link to relevant pages from within your text. Think about adding a feature menu to highlight important sections of your site.

• Keep it short, snappy and focussed. People scan read on the web, even more so than they do with print copy. Break your content down in to bite size, ‘scannable’ chunks. You can link to further details for those that want to read them – once you’ve got that person’s attention initially.

• If you’re writing your website copy yourself, at the very least get someone outside your business to have a look & give their opinion. Don’t forget you have an awful lot of background knowledge about your business and industry that a lot of people coming to your site won’t have. That’s why you need someone outside the business to give you ‘the newcomer’ viewpoint.

• Include a call to action on each page!! After putting the hard work in getting people’s attention and keeping them on your site, don’t go and spoil it by not giving your telephone number! Make your contact details easy to find, and I’d recommend you put your telephone number in a prominent position on each and every page.

See, that wasn’t difficult was it? It’s not money, it’s not rocket science… it’s just a case of applying a bit of good old common sense.