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Ten Tips for Writing Effective Website Copy
According to Google, there are currently more than 8 billion web pages. [1] These pages contain hundreds of billions of words, along with billions of graphics, animations, movies, and simulations. Considering the investment your firm makes in online advertising, lead generation, public relations, and tradeshows, your website has become the most vital element of the marketing mix. With all this content available, how do people decide which sites to visit—and to do business with? How do you bring them to your site—and keep them there?
To be effective, website copy must draw in first-time visitors, inform current customers and partners, lead visitors to a purchase decision, and rank highly with the most popular search engines. How do you write this type of website copy? How do you make sure it has the impact you need? In this month’s issue of Focus Forward, we offer some tips for writing effective website copy, including these key topics:
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Each issue of Focus Forward features a viewpoint on a critical customer topic. We focus on what’s happening and what’s coming down the line. These are issues that you’ve told us keep you up at night. Though we work with clients in the technology, healthcare, and financial services industries, we hope the newsletter is informative to any business that needs to communicate—to customers, partners, or suppliers.
Tip 1: Involve All the Stakeholders from the Start
While your website may be managed by the Marketing department, managers throughout the company have a vested interest in its content, messaging, and functionality. As a result, website copy writing projects are often derailed for one simple reason: the project manager neglects to involve all stakeholders from the start. To be successful, the project manager needs to make sure everyone who has a stake in the outcome is represented—Executive Management, Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, Engineering, and Legal.
All of these groups may not need to participate throughout the project, but make sure you listen to their input upfront. Each stakeholder has unique requirements, and these requirements must be met if the project is to succeed. If any one of these groups is not satisfied, you may alienate stakeholders and get the biggest surprise of all at the end—not going live with your new website copy.
Tip 2: Define Your Target Audience
About a year ago, I wrote a Focus Forward article about white papers that stressed the importance of defining your target audience. [2] You also need to know your audience to write effective website copy. Are you communicating with high-ranking executives in the C suite? Line-of-business managers and other key decision makers? IT professionals trying to learn about current product or service offerings? Different audiences have different requirements, and a “one-size-fits-all” approach rarely meets these diverse necessities. Successful website copy makes it easy for readers to find information that reflects their unique needs.
Tip 3: Determine Key Themes and Messages
Once you’ve defined your target audience, you must determine the key themes and messages for your homepage and the subordinate pages of the site. The copy, or text, used in your website is where the action is; it’s where you capture the attention of your audience. Someone once said, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”; on the web, you typically have only 10-15 seconds to make that impression.
Website readers have short attention spans. So, instead of simply cutting and pasting copy from your existing brochures and data sheets, use simple, direct, and easy-to-understand words and phrases. This writing style quickly engages your reader; it also makes the copy easier to translate if your company sells its product or service in the global marketplace.
Tip 4: Organize Existing and New Content
Begin by organizing the pages of the website—and the subordinate pages of the site. Be sure to include in your planning what content you need in each section, what you can reuse or repurpose, and where you can use links to keep the page count manageable.
Start simple, then get down to the details. You don’t need to tell your readers everything at once; if they’re interested, they’ll keep reading or surfing until they find what they’re looking for. If your homepage is the welcome mat to your Internet home, the rest of the pages are the rooms. Make sure they are friendly, inviting and organized—not a cluttered mess. Your homepage should tell your visitors specifically why they should spend time on your website—what’s in it for them. You can go into more detail on your inner pages.
Presenting a lot of information is good, but make sure you break it up into well thought-out, organized pieces that are easy for your visitor to handle; this is known as “chunking” the information and is a standard practice for writing website copy. If you organize your copy correctly, your visitors will find the information they need to help make them comfortable, happy customers.
Tip 5: Optimize Your Text for Search Engines
The return on your website investment increases with the number of visits or “hits” you get. As a result, the writer has to strike a balance between creating website copy with the reader in mind and using language optimized for search engines. Search engines “read” your pages in a different way and for a different purpose than people do. Balancing your choice of words so the content is clear and engaging for people, yet includes effective keywords, is always a challenge.
Relevance is the most important factor to good search engine placement—and it’s the absolute bottom line when it comes to good search engine performance. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Dogpile continually change how they rank results in order to achieve their primary goal—providing relevant search results. Any attempts to “trick” one of these sophisticated search engines into thinking a page is relevant when it really isn’t will ultimately fail.
Here are a few things you can do to optimize copy for search engines:
- Choose your keywords upfront. When writing optimized copy for your website, choose your keywords upfront and weave them into the copy as you write it. Do some research and find the most likely keywords and keyword phrases that Internet surfers would use to find a website such as yours. You may already know these words intuitively or through market research. You can use the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool or Wordtracker to find variations and combinations that you never thought of. Compile your keyword list and then get ready for the next step.
- Place your keywords strategically in the document. There is no magic formula for placing keywords—just be natural. Listen closely to a good public speaker and think about what you hear. At the start of her speech she probably informs her audience what she is going to say; she talks about the major points she’s already outlined; and, at the end, she summarizes her main points. Write your website copy in this way and your main keywords will be well distributed naturally throughout your site.
- Embed keywords in the HTML source. Check with your IT team to find out what they’re doing with keywords in the HTML source. They can help you place keywords in the HTML tags to improve a page’s ranking. You can use your main keywords in a text link, linking to another page on your website that has similar content. Finally, give the page a filename that uses your most important keyword.
Tip 6: Keep It Simple
The presentation of your ideas—your word choice, grammar, spelling, and tone—are critical. Avoid flowery or colloquial word choices that might be misinterpreted or misunderstood, especially by international audiences. Avoid jargon unless you know you’re speaking directly to a highly informed, specific audience.
Don’t make your paragraphs too long and bulky, and don’t use run-on sentences. If you need a primer on direct, unambiguous writing, Strunk and White’s masterpiece, The Elements of Style, [3] is the gold standard—short, direct, and easy to navigate.
Create a simple stylesheet that includes your preferences for use of punctuation marks, numbers, and key terms so that they are used consistently throughout the copy. You don’t have to invent a stylesheet from scratch; simply use a standard reference like the AP Stylebook [4] or The Chicago Manual of Style [5], along with your favorite hardcopy or online dictionary and thesaurus. If multiple writers are working on the project, make sure they each have a copy of the stylesheet and that they use it—consistency of style and tone is essential for ease of readability.
Proofread everything—twice. Visitors might think the splash screen you developed in Flash MX is cool, but if you misspell your product name on your homepage, they are going to click the Back button as soon as they can. Find a razor-sharp editor in-house or hire an outside resource to cut any excess words that might distract from the rest of your copy. A crack editor can also make sure your copy flows properly and that your ideas are presented the way you intended them to be.
Tip 7: Make Pages Scannable
As discussed earlier, web surfers are searching for information. They’re moving quickly to find something of interest or something that meets a need. You need to make it easy for readers to scan the page for the information they need, find it quickly, and take an action—send an e-mail, make a call, fill out an application, or place an order. Use a large, readable font, descriptive headlines, and short paragraphs. Bold text can help make your copy scannable, but use it judiciously. If everything is bold, you’ve defeated your purpose. Stay away from exclamation marks; they are overly dramatic, make people edgy, create a false sense of excitement, and don’t communicate more effectively.
Tip 8: Delineate Reviewers’ Responsibilities
Because you have a number of different teams represented on the project, you need to clearly delineate the responsibilities of the reviewers (along with a timeline for each review). For example, the Executive, Sales, and Marketing teams need to be told to focus their reviewing efforts on how the copy positions your company and its product or service in the market; Engineering and Customer Support should address the technical accuracy of the content; Legal should concentrate on how your company’s intellectual property—copyright, trademarks, service marks—is being protected and whether you’re violating another company’s trademarks or service marks. These teams should focus on the message and whether it’s presenting the company in the right light; they should leave the actual editing to an expert editor within your company or an outside editing resource.
Tip 9: Test, Test, Test
Once you’ve produced the content, publish the sources to a “staging” directory or server for testing purposes. This testing will make sure that any scripts you’ve written work properly and that your pages display properly in the most popular web browsers—
Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, AOL, and Netscape—and operating systems—Windows, MacOS, UNIX, and Linux. If your users are likely to print select pages—those with explanatory charts or graphs, press releases, or forms—be sure to test how well those pages print. You need a system or process for tracking bugs, communicating with the team about them, and fixing and re-testing to make sure the bugs have been fixed correctly.
Tip 10: Go Live
Once all the stakeholders have reviewed and approved the final copy, and you’ve found and fixed any bugs, you’re ready to go live in your “production” environment. For obvious reasons, it’s best to do this during a standard maintenance window or when people are unlikely to be hitting your website heavily. It takes a few days for the new website pages to filter through various search engines, so don’t be disappointed if you don’t see the new pages appear near the top of the hit lists on day one—if you wrote them correctly, they’ll begin to show up.
Summary
Writing effective website copy is hard work and requires a clear motivation—promoting a new product or service, reaching out to a new market, challenging a competitor in the market, or updating the corporate look and feel. Sometimes companies have internal resources available with the time and expertise to write good copy, produce pages that are appealing to the eye, and manage the entire process from start to finish. However, many companies cannot do everything on their own; if you’re one of these companies, bringing in a strategic partner for one or more elements of the project is often your only choice. Without sufficient resources, your website is rarely updated, resulting in stale, outdated content, a decrease in web traffic—and potential lost business for your company.
Notes
- 8,058,044,651 as of May 27,2005
- Writing a White Paper: A Blend of Art and Science, http://timrosaassociates.com/newsletter/archive_html/mar2004_vol1no2.html
- The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White
- The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, Associated Press and Norm Goldstein (Editors)
- The Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago Press Staff
Resources
Learn More
Tim Rosa Associates specializes in helping technology, healthcare, and financial services companies develop website copy that engages readers, defines your company’s products and services, differentiates them in the global marketplace, and generates revenue. We can develop content from scratch, re-purpose existing content for new business requirements, or work within your existing website parameters—whichever is easiest for you. We also have partnerships with leading user interface, design, and technical website development companies so we can deliver a complete website solution for you.
Thanks for reading,
Tim Rosa
Founder
Copyright © 2005 Tim Rosa Associates, LLC. All rights reserved. |
