Quality copywriting is essential for website performance. As the business landscape has dramatically shifted online in the last two decades, businesses can no longer rely on foot traffic to generate revenue. As a result, every business needs a significant online presence to survive.
That’s where good website copy comes in…
Keep reading to learn what copy means, why it’s important, what good copy looks like and how The Creative Collective team can help you produce awesome copy for your website.
WHAT DOES COPY MEAN?
Before we get into the importance of good copy, we should clarify what copy actually means! A lot of people get ‘content’ and ‘copy’ confused and often use the terms interchangeably. However, these terms refer to very different things.
Copy refers to the many kinds of texts that are crafted to achieve a purpose such as persuading audiences to act in a certain way. This can include buying a product or engaging a service. Copy includes all promotional content like website copy, text on flyers, billboards and advertisements.
Content is used more broadly to define all kinds of texts that provide information for consumers. This can include text, videos, imagery and graphics.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO HAVE GOOD COPY?
Good copywriting is essential in order to satisfy the two most important audiences: your customer and search engines.
The Customer
In the digital age we live in, your website needs to inform anyone landing on it about your brand, business and offering. Therefore, it is incredibly important to produce a professional, informative and engaging website that is able to engage and ultimately convert viewers to contact you or buy as quickly as possible.
Many of us would assume that a good website comes to images and design and many of our clients are certainly wowed by these aspects of a website, and often bring us designs they like to emulate which is totally fine. However, considering the design of a website is only looking at one aspect of the successful website equation. While images and design are important, if you don’t have enough copy, or suitable copy on your website, not only will potential customers or return customers not be able to find your website on the search engines in the first place, they won’t have anything much to read once they get there!
Now whilst we aren’t suggesting you write a novel on your home page, we are saying you will need to think about the first messages your website users will read on arrival. This could be the slogan you have on your slider, your header, and then subheadings, right through to your introductory paragraph. Great website copy is able to not only grab the attention of any visitors, it will communicate the right kind of messages to the right kind of audiences, and more importantly, be written in a way which is clever enough to keep them on the website and reading long enough to take the action you want them to.
In addition, websites need to educate and inform. If people understand who you are, what you have to offer, and whether it is suitable for them, it can help them decide to enquire or make a purchase.
Search Engines
As I mentioned just before, without suitable copy on your website, people won’t be able to find you. Let’s explore this in more detail. Many people we talk to aren’t aware that search engines index PAGES and not WEBSITES or your HOMEPAGE. What this means is that each and every page of your website should be carefully crafted when it comes to copy. If your website is well put together and submitted to the search engines once completed, visitors can potentially arrive on any internal page on the site. The copy they arrive at… should be able to facilitate them through the website as well as the home page would.
In short, Google needs text to crawl over a website to determine what it is about and what traffic to bring you. If you execute a good copywriting strategy that takes SEO considerations into account, Google will potentially value your content enough to deem it worthy of showing among top page results and will help to bring you more visitors. Check out some of our tips below to help you do this for your own website.
You AND Your Team
Another benefit of good website copy that is commonly overlooked is you and your team! Investing in good website copy can mean you have content you can then reuse in other marketing mediums such as social media posts, newsletters, flyers or other marketing collateral. It can also serve as sales copy. Once each page has been carefully considered and the copy is written, you can message or email potential customers, or tell people in person or via the phone which page on your website has the information they are looking for. If your website can sufficiently support you and your team in terms of your sales process and marketing, it can save you a lot of time and money.
WHAT DOES GOOD COPY LOOK LIKE?
Okay, so now we know that good copy is important. But how do we know what good copy actually looks like?
Strong Emotional Appeal
By carefully including the right words, you can create a strong emotional appeal for your product, service, event or offering. The right words will imbibe the right emotions and will likely get your ideal audience reading on and clicking, or even better enquiring or buying.
Unique in Nature
People often know what they are looking for when they commence a search and they want to know that you and your business are the right choice for them. Conveying your most unique aspects is very important when writing copy. State facts that make you unique and position you in a compelling way. For instance were you established some time ago and therefore are a longstanding and reputable brand or business? Mention it! Did a celebrity buy one of your products and loved it? Mention this too. Have you been featured in any industry or national media? Say it! Have you won awards? Got a long service warranty? Specialise in a certain area? Make sure you outline all of this too.
As the digital landscape is so crowded, it’s important that your website copy helps you to stand out from the crowd. You will need to convince audiences of your unique selling position by providing evidence of what makes your brand special and showing that your business is a knowledgeable industry authority.
Talk Directly to Your Ideal Audience
The best copywriters understand that they are not writing to the masses. You should be speaking to your ideal target market and have this person/type of people firmly in mind as you write. Also use words like ‘you’ and ‘your’ to draw them in as by doing this it conveys that you are speaking directly to them and not in a third person and impersonal tone.
Benefits and Problem Solving
The best way to convince audiences to purchase your product or service over a competitor’s product or service is to talk about the problem/s you know they have, then explain how your product or service can solve their problem. We call this ‘giving them a headache and then selling them the pill!’
You can then go on to outline the many benefits your product or service has which will help the reader to feel compelled to take action. By clarifying exactly how you can make a consumer’s life easier, they will be more inclined to take action. Speak with positivity and enthusiasm and give specifics in order to produce memorable website copy.
Call To Action…
Including ‘Call To Action’ points at regular intervals on your web page helps you close the deal with potential customers. This could include offering an incentive to buy today, discounts, limited edition items, and bonus gifts. By producing a concise and direct call to action, you can entice prospective customers to reach for their wallets.
Size Matters
While some people don’t write enough copy, some produce too much. Getting the balance right and relevance is key. Don’t go on about stuff just to get your word count up. But if there is a lot to say, use clever tactics to break up the copy such as headings, sub headings, bullet points and regular calls to action. From an SEO perspective, we recommend a minimum of 300 words per page but more will often perform better on the search engines. However ensuring you have selected a key phrase and are centring the copy around this key phrase, always produces the strongest results.
Readability
When creating great copy for websites, you have to remember that you are writing for audiences that may have little to no understanding of your core business activities. To make things as clear as possible, it is important to take text readability into account.
The Flesch Reading Ease Test can help you measure the readability of texts. By using the variables of the average sentence length and average number of syllables per word, the test provides a readability score between 0 and 100. A score of 100 means your copy is very easy to read. A score of 0 means your text is very difficult to read. Below is a table clarifying the reading ability required for each readability score.
If you want your business to cater to a wide demographic or a younger demographic, you must adjust your copy accordingly. This allows visitors of all ages and education levels to understand content with ease. Otherwise, you will find that your audience is unable to read your copy and will end up frustrated, confused and unwilling to engage with your product or service.
Keywords
As we mentioned, good copywriting includes taking SEO considerations into account. Part of this process is the inclusion of keywords that will direct the right kind of traffic to your website. We generally recommend a keyword density of 1-3% per page. However, it is an art to get the level right so that content doesn’t read as spammy and annoying.
HOW DO I GET STARTED?
Do It Yourself
If you have lots of spare time and a desire to gain new skills, you can learn how to write copy for your own website. However, if you’re not a confident writer, the safest decision is to hire an experienced copywriter.
Engage Copywriting Services
If you do decide that it is more efficient to outsource your copywriting needs, a website copywriter can assist you. The best copywriters will have experience in your particular industry and will have the knowledge to create content that gets the results you need. They will also be well versed in the requirements for search engine optimisation and prospective customer needs.
The Creative Collective Copywriting Services
Our team has a number of skilled writers with experience in most industries and business types. This means that we are able to match you with the best copywriter for the job who already has knowledge of industry subject matter and target audiences.
The Creative Collective copywriting service is able to kill two birds with one stone. As each of our copywriters are equipped to include SEO requirements within persuasive website copy, they are able to cut through all the noise while still resonating with audiences. We also ensure consistency across pages with uniform tone of voice, language, formatting and punctuation for a professional finish.
Generally, we can prepare and deliver website copywriting in as little as one week. However, this does depend on production schedules and sign-off from you. In our experience, copy is a point of struggle for a lot of clients. It can often take anywhere from 2 weeks to 12 months to prepare without our assistance.
WANT MORE INFORMATION?
If you are considering quality copywriting for your website performance, check out all the details here.
Wanting some training to help you do your own copywriting? Check out the training options with our sister company, The Training Collective.
Thinking about combining a website rebuild and copywriting services? Check out our blog post on Typical Website Build Inclusions and then schedule a chat to discuss your options.
We hope you’ve found this blog post helpful. Feel free to share it if you know someone who is looking to contract a company for copywriting services. If you do decide to go it alone, we wish you all the best with your project!