What Makes Web Copywriting Great

One thing that puts a lot of people of a site is sloppy wordmanship, as well as a poor design.  It is easy to become inconsistent with phrases used to describe certain benefits of products, within your copy.

Be aware at all times of your spelling, grammar and formatting of your copy.  Many sites have lost sales because of small spelling mistakes, or bad formatting.  Always use a spell checker and a human eye to ensure that everything is correct.

Formatting can be improved by:

·        Breaking up large chunks of text, by making sure that your paragraphs are small and easily digestible.

·        Another way of breaking up large chunks of text is to indent key elements, as this will help emphasize a point and will lead the reader's eyes to this part of the copy.

·        Keep the width of the page of your site quite narrow, as the human eye finds it easier to read sentences of a smaller width.

·        Use plenty of subheadings and bullet points, as these will help the visitors who just like to skim read, before deciding whether they'd like to read the whole thing.  These subheadings and bullet points should portray the key points.

·        Make sure that your links to other URLs are in a universal format, (blue and underlined) so that you do not confuse the visitor.

It is essential to check through your copy for these inconsistencies, not just once, but on a regular basis, as you don't always catch them all first time round.  Also check that what you are trying to communicate is ultra clear and easy to understand.

Other off putting traits of copywriting include lots of capital letters and exclamation marks, as it makes your site look very childish.  Instead of capitals, you can use bold text, or highlighting to emphasize important points.

Writing copy is not the same as writing articles, short reports or any other type of writing, as you need to have a really good understanding of the written language.

The language you use in your copy has to be very well thought out, as you need to manipulate the language to influence people's buying behaviors.  You need a good understanding of what words to use in your copy and which to avoid.  Also you need to think about what phrases to use to make the visitor read on. (There is a chapter on power words and transitions later on, which will help you understand these concepts more.) 

Inject Your Copy With Personality

You need to write your copy with vivid images and keep the tone light and unassuming.  Do not bore the visitor, as once again, you will lose them.

Include stories in your copy, that show the reader that you know what they are feeling, what they are going through and then how your information, product, or service can help them.

So inject your personality throughout all the copy and keep it consistent, so that you create a connection with the reader and they begin to trust what you say.  This is one of the keys to effective copy.

If You Do Feel that you Need Longer Copy...

Sometimes to answer all your visitor's potential questions, you will need to consider longer copy.  It is not a science set in stone – copy needs to be as long as it needs to be to convey an idea or benefit to the reader.

If you fall into this category, then you must organize your copy in a way that does not scare your reader away.  So do not have a long page full of heavy text.  You need to have separate paragraphs for each idea and benefit, plenty of subheadings and bullet points, to enable the reader to scan down the page to locate the ideas and information, which appeals to them.

Long copy, as with short copy needs to be easy to understand, as if a visitor does not understand what you are trying to convey, you will lose them.

Should You Keep Your Copy Short and Sweet?

When writing your copy, you should always bear in mind that you want visitors to stay on your site and also encourage them to return.  Here are some considerations to think about as you start to write your copy.

Try to Keep your Copy Short and Simple

It is worth remembering that unless a visitor has been forwarded to a particular page on your site, they will only read a few lines of text.  If they see a whole load of text on a page, they may be put off reading it.  So if possible, you should try to keep your copy short.

You also need to make your copy simple, so that anyone reading it will be able to understand it upon reading it just the once.  You do not want them to have to think about what you have written, in order for them to understand it.

You need to try to convey a benefit, or piece of important information in a couple of lines.  If you try to expand on that, you run the risk of making the idea too convoluted and difficult to understand.

If you do want to expand on an idea, you can anticipate that some visitors will want to know more about that idea and provide a link to another page that has more details on that idea, so that if a visitors wants more information, they can get hold of it quickly and easily.

How to Use Keywords to Attract the Search Engines

Yet another important aspect when it comes to good web copy is being able to write good page titles and META descriptions.  These are what will be grabbed hold off by all the people who see them on the search engines, as these often will be the deciding factor on whether a person clicks through to your site from the search engines.

There are some search engines and directories that do not show the META descriptions, but they do show snippets of your content from your site.  So getting the titles, the META descriptions and your copy right are crucial.

Where the search engines are concerned, I have listed the particular areas of your site structure in order of importance, where you need to incorporate your chosen keywords to get people to click through to your site.

1.                 Page Title – this is what is usually brought up in the search engines results and is the first thing that people see when conducting a search on the web.

2.  META Description – This is usually the second text blurb that the visitor will see when carrying out a search through a search engine or directory.   Both items 1 and 2 are usually included on the Search Engine's Results Page (SERP's)

3.  Heading Tags – The search engines will take notice of heading tags within your copy, so when you put in your headline and subheads, make sure to make them H1 tags and include your keywords.

4.  Visible Content – The actual content on your site is important as well.  You can scatter keywords throughout your copy, as well as including them in the following ways:

a.               Hyperlinked Text and Title Attribute – When you have hyperlinks within your copy, you can also have a title attribute, with some keywords included.  This will show up when the cursor moves over the hyperlinked text.

b.               Alternate Text Tags – When you include an image in your content, you can also include an alternate text tag with a couple of relevant keywords included (they have to be relevant to the image – do not keyword stuff).  In the same way as the hyperlinked text, when the cursor is moved over the image, this alternative text will show.

c.                META Keyword Tags – These used to be important to the seach engines, but unfortunately, due to unethical marketers, search engines no longer put a great emphasis on these.  You can still include keywords here, but  make sure you use the same keywords in the visible content on the page. 

From this chapter and the previous one, you can see how important keyword research and putting these keywords into your site is, for effective web copy. 

After all, what is the point of writing any copy if you do not know what your visitors are searching for?

Targeting keywords is one of the most important processes in writing great web copy.

What's the Importance of Keywords

Search engines are one of the most important ways that will bring new visitors to your site.  If someone has never even heard of your site before, a search engine might throw up your site as a good match for the keywords they enter in, or it will throw up a competitors site!

Search engines are not that intuitive, so they will not always give results that reflect what people are looking for.  They can only give results for what people are typing into the search engines, so you need to think about what people might type into the search engines to find a site, like yours.

So how do you find out the keywords that people might type into search engines, to find your site?

Well, there are a number of ways, with which you can beat your competitor's websites, when it comes to working out what people search for.  There are many good ways to find these keywords.  My favorite method is using the free Google Adwords External Keyword Tool, which can be found here:

lhttps://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExterna

Here you can enter keywords and it will give you further suggestions as to what people are searching for.  Ideally you need to find keywords that are searched for a number of times each month.  I would recommend finding ones that get at least 500 searches a month.

Next you need to go to Google and type in these keywords in quotation marks to see how many other websites are targeting those keywords.

For example, we can see that the keyword self help for panic attacks has over 1,000 searches a month:

When we enter the phrase  “self help for panic attacks” in to Google, we can see that there are 65,100 sites who can be found with this key phrase.

Now, ideally the nearer this number is to 0 the easier it is to rank on the search engines for this key term.  However, considering how many websites there are on the internet 65,100 is not such a hard target to rank in the first few pages of the search engines.  I wouldn't go for keywords that have over 75,000 competing websites.

So you need to identify keywords that relate to your website, that a fair few people search for each month, but these keywords should not have too much competition.  These keywords could be problems that your website solves – e.g how to get rid of love handles.

In the next chapter, we will be discussing how to insert these keywords into your site structure and web copy.  This will make the search engines pick up your site a lot faster and include it in the results, when people type in your selected keywords.

Ideally, you should define your keywords before you build your site, as this means you won't have to do much rewriting later.  It should be part of the planning stage.   This is an essential step, as if you don't target certain keywords, your competition will.

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Discover Your USP

A unique selling proposition (USP) will often be what makes your reader decide to read more on your site, so you should spend some time considering what your USP is.

A USP clearly answers the question:  Why should your readers choose you and your website over every other website, or option they have?

You absolutely must answer this question in your web copy and all your other marketing efforts.

Really think hard about, why should your reader choose your website, over any other website?  This will be the basis of your USP.

I know that this is not the easiest question in the world to answer and requires a lot of effort, but it is so worth it.  Finding your USP can really transform your website by attracting new readers, getting repeat visitors and people recommending your site.

Here are three things that you can consider to determine your very own USP

(1)             Your Customers

First, you need to think about your customers, as it is them who will make the decision to stay on your website, or visit another website.  Think about the benefits they are looking for and what frustrations your website solves.

(2)              Your Competitors

Next, consider your competitors - what makes you better than them?  (Having a good USP will properly be a good start, as few of them have a well articulated USP).  Other things to think about are where is the gap in your market, or what are your competitors not providing?

(3)              You and Your Website

Lastly, if you have not managed to find a USP, looking at your customers or competitors, then look at yourself and your website.  What are your strengths and passions? What can you offer that no-one else can?

A USP gives visitors to your website a reason to stay on your site, instead of clicking away to a competitor's site.

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The Plan: Knowing What Your Visitors Want to Find

A plan is a vital stage of copywriting on the web, as knowing exactly what you want to accomplish is key.

First, you need to determine your own site goals, whether you want to increase sales, build a list, give out useful information, or a product.  In order to do this, you will need to use your web copy to accomplish your goal.

To produce great copy, you need to know your visitors and exactly what they want, so you need to determine who your core audience is.  You cannot be all things to everyone,  so the copy you create needs to be targeted.  

You need to know who you are targeting, or else you will miss out on the people who are most willing and eager to pay for your help and expertise.

You can determine your target market by figuring out what particular problems, your site solves, whether you are offering a product, service or information.  You have to know your product inside out and all it's benefits and how they equate to your potential customer's problem.

When you have determined who is your targeted audience, you can then start hunting them down and create a profile of the people who would benefit most from your help.  You need to use strong web copy to explain what the site can do for them specifically, with strong benefits as bait.

If you need to target different types of visitors to your site, with different problems, then create separate pages for each of their requirements.  If you don't provide exactly what a visitor needs and quickly, they will go elsewhere and you will be forgotten.  You need to offer something of value that is useful, especially if it is free.

You can consider visitors to your site as goldfish, except they have an attention span of 15 seconds, which is why they need to be captivated by something they can use.

There are four simple questions that your core audience will need answered in your web content immediately. 

They are:

1.     Is this the site I want?

2.     Can I find what I am looking for?

3.     What's in it for me?

4.     Is it easy to find what I need?

You can answer these questions to a certain extent with your site's navigation and design, however you should use your copy to explain them, as well.  These answers need to be blatantly obvious to first time visitors, as well as regular users of the site.

By now, you will have already decided your core audience and what it is that they really want, now you will need to work your copy to achieve your goals and theirs.   Here is a strategy, you can use.  Bare in mind, each point is as important as the next:

1.                 First of all, you need to write about what your customer wants and needs

2.                 Your tone needs to appeal to your target audience.

3.                 Your copy must be uncomplicated easy to understand.

If you do not follow these rules, you will lose visitors - as half will not bother trying to work it out and the other half may find it too difficult to find the answers.

You should always remember this KISS!  Keep It Simple Stupid

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