Top 10 Website Copywriting Tips
Following on from our beginner’s guide to website copywriting, we’ve compiled our top 10 tips to help you write fantastic copy for your small business website.
This is not an exhaustive list but putting these 10 tips into practise will make sure you avoid many of the common pitfalls people make when writing their own website copy;
- Keyword research
Finding the right keywords to use throughout your website copy is a good starting point and there’s much more on this in our 10 tips for effective keyword research article.
- Buy a copywriting book
Anyone can write copy for their website but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good, regardless of how well they know their product or target market.
There are loads of great copywriting books out there which provide more information on all aspects of web copywriting and how to put these into practise. One such book is “Web Copy That Sells” by Maria Veloso.
- Don’t settle on your first effort
All the best copywriters get to the top of their profession through practising their craft. While you may not have years to perfect your copywriting skills, you should never settle for your first effort at writing copy for your website.
It’s a good idea to return to what you’ve written the next day and see if there are any areas you can improve upon.
- Give your writing personality
When you’re writing your website copy think about what your target market would like to read. Let’s face it nobody really enjoys reading long winded, boring corporate style copy that has no emotion or spark to it.
Give your writing some personality and it will engage far more people than dull, lifeless text that never really gets going. Use the language your target market uses, make it lively, interesting and easy to read and you will encourage people to stay on your website for longer.
- Let other people read your work
Having a second pair of eyes look over your copy is a very good idea before you think about putting it on your website.
Someone may be able to suggest improvements or spot errors you’ve made and if you can find someone who fits into your target market to read it, then all the better as they can let you know whether it hits the right note or needs more work.
- Look at the copy on other websites
Most good copywriters have developed their own style through looking at other people’s work. Now of course we’re not saying you should copy the text from another website, but looking at sites similar to yours can let you see how other people have approached their copywriting and how they’ve tried to grab attention and engage people who visit the site.
- The right amount of words
It’s no secret that people want information quickly online, so if you try to explain your products or services using a few thousand words rather than a few hundred, you’re not going to get the sales or leads you were hoping for.
As a rough guide your web pages should have in the region of 250-500 words on them. Any more than 500 is too many and if you use fewer than 250 then you may struggle to get your point across.
- Meta tags matter
When writing your website copy it’s important to compose the meta titles and descriptions for each page and give these to your web designer.
The meta title appears at the top of the browser bar and on search engine results. This helps the search engines identify what your site is about so it’s important to use your keywords in your meta titles and not just leave it as “untitled”.
Each page should have its own unique meta title with your relevant keyword or phrase first followed by your company name.
The meta description is used by the search engines in the form of the two lines which appear under your meta title in the search engine results. This text is your chance to get people to click through to your site and it should include relevant keywords and phrases as they occur naturally and not just be crammed full of them in a spammy way.
- Use your keywords early in the copy
In terms of search engine optimisation it’s recommended that you use your keyword or phrase for each page as early as possible in the body text as well as in your main headline.
This will also help visitors to your site recognise that it is relevant to what they’ve searched for. For example if someone types “Edinburgh Glazier” into Google and clicks through to your website, if you have this term in the headline and first sentence of your body copy, it will let them indicate to them that your site is relevant to their search and they are likely to read on.
- Don’t treat copy as a poor relation
When having a new website designed it’s easy to fall into the trap of becoming obsessed by how it looks and what image it portrays. All too often copywriting comes a poor second to the design process but it’s equally as important.
People aren’t going to visit your website and decide to buy from you just by looking at the design of it; they will want to read about what you’re offering too.
By treating design and copy as an equal 50% of your overall website you will achieve much better results, so it’s critical that you take your time over writing your website copy and don’t just do it as an afterthought.
If you liked this post you may also want to read how to write great headlines
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