Welcome to the first in a four-part series of blogs that will improve your website.
During this series I will share with you the key points, tips, tricks and hints that you need to know if you want your website to say all the right things to your customers.
Now it might seem counter-intuitive for me as a professional copywriter to be doing this when I’m normally telling clients that I will do it for them. And in fact (surprise, surprise) I’m a huge advocate of engaging a professional copywriter from the very beginning of planning your website.
But I look at it like this. If you can afford to engage a copywriter then you should. You’re investing in the best for your website. If, however, you know something about what your website needs then your partnership with your copywriter will be so much more fruitful. And if you can’t afford one, well, better to have some idea than none.
Ok, in this first part, I’m going to keep it general and introduce some key ideas. I’ll then get into the detail as the series progresses. Oh, and feel free to chip in as we go. I don’t have a monopoly on wisdom and the more ideas we generate the better. Right, here we go…
What copywriting isn’t
We definitely need to get this out of the way first. Copywriting is not content marketing. Content marketing is the bigger game involving (yes) content alongside social media and search activity. It’s also not search engine optimisation (SEO) which takes in more technical aspects of web structure and positioning. And it’s not the design. All of these do, however, overlap with copywriting. Hence my urging to involve your copywriter from the start.
Mirror, mirror…
Try this exercise. Pick a website. Your own maybe. Look at it critically and ask yourself these questions:
appearance – how easy on the eye is the layout, how quick is the information to take in and understand?
grammar – is the spelling correct, are there words missing or in the wrong place?
succinct – are the sentences short, simple and to the point?
bullets/numbers – is the copy broken up with short lists?
bold subtitles – are these being used to separate blocks of type?
call to action – do you know what you’re being asked to do?
These are just some of the things to look out for when you evaluate the copy. There are many others and we’ll look at them in more detail as this series develops. Knowing how people look at and read websites is vital. Basically you need to make the information jump off the page.
Who do you think you’re talking to?
So, you’re evaluating the pages of this website. Do you feel like it’s talking to you? Or is it full of information about the website’s owner? If the latter, how does that make you feel? Engaged? Excluded? Struggling to find why you should bother? No idea what’s in it for you? We’ll be looking in more detail later at why your website copy is about your customer, not about you.
Coming up
OK we’ve had a quick introduction to web copywriting and some of the elements to keep in mind and I hope you now have a basic understanding of what it is (and isn’t) and it’s importance. In the next three instalments I’ll be looking at these elements in more detail along with headlines, key words, calls to action, style and many other topics, all of which will play their part in turning your web copy into great web copy.
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