web copy writing tips Archives

How to Write Web Copy

by Adam Oakley | Jan 12, 2017 | How to Write

Web copy has the power to make or break your online presence.

Think about it for a moment.

When new customers find your company online, what is the first impression they get? It’s coming from your web copy, but does that copy welcome them in or push them away? Does it educate them? Is it funny and relatable and written specifically for them? If not, it’s not fulfilling its purpose.

If you want to succeed online, you need to learn how to write web copy that intrigues, delights, and inspires your readers. Only through learning how to do this will you excel at online marketing and build the reputation your brand deserves.

Read on.

How to Write Web Copy (and Why it Matters)

Today, experts claim that we only have seven seconds to make a first impression. People who find their way to your website or social media profiles are developing an impression of you and your company as soon as they start reading, and that impression can either help or harm your business.

Think about the sites that publish web content that stands out in your mind. What do you love about them?

If you’re like most people, you love that these sites speak to you like a real human that wants to learn new things, rather than a “target persona” with no name or feelings.

These companies know how to create compelling web copy, and you can follow suit by paying attention to what they do so well.

How to Write Web Copy 101: 10 Smart Tips

If you want to learn how to write web copy, follow these ten quick tips:

1. Keep scanning in mind.

While people read books, people scan web copy. Because of this, you can’t write the two things the same way. Web copy must adhere to the way that people read web copy, which means it must be straightforward and easy to digest.

It must also keep the habit of scanning in mind. This means short, succinct paragraphs, headers, and subheaders that tell readers what to expect in a section, and bulleted or numbered lists that showcase must-have bits of information.

When your web copy includes these components, it will automatically become more reader-friendly, and it will perform better online.

2. Give your readers what they want.

People don’t read marketing blogs just because. In most cases, they’re looking for information, trying to solve a problem, or searching for a product to purchase. In other words, they’re on the hunt, and it’s your job to give them what they want.

The first step in doing this, of course, is to understand your readers. What do they want? If you don’t know, develop a buyer persona to help you put your finger on their top needs and desires.

Once you’ve done this, be sure that your content is positioned in such a way that it’s delivering what your customers are looking for. In addition to making your content more relevant to them, this simple step will also help ensure that your web content finds its niche and stays there.

3. Arrange your content with the most relevant information at the top.

Think about how you bait a hook to go fishing. You don’t place the bait halfway up the line, where the fish is unlikely to see it, do you? Instead, you put the bait on the hook, right where the fish is virtually guaranteed to bump into it.

The same practice applies to your web content. When you top-load your articles and blogs with the most relevant and important information in the first few paragraphs of the body copy, you stand a better chance of “hooking” readers and keeping them there.

With this in mind, add all of the most critical details of your piece to the upper portion of the web page. Depending on the topic of the page, this could include benefits of a product, detailed information about an event or launch, or statistics that illustrate your point.

To take your web content a step further, use the personal “you” voice, and a selection of facts, figures, and statistics to appeal to your readers and draw them in from the get-go.

4. Don’t try to sound smart.

One of the most-shared blogs of the year was on exactly this topic. Published by Harvard Business Review on October 5, 2016, “Stop Trying to Sound Smart When You’re Writing” is all about how trying to sound smart often has exactly the opposite effect. Instead of impressing your readers, it alienates them. Instead of boosting your brand, it harms it.

That said, start writing the way you talk. In addition to being more authentic for you and your company, this approach will also help to keep readers interested. When you don’t speak down to people, they’re more likely to want to stick around and engage with your content. This is a great thing for both you and your brand.

5. Get rid of the jargon.

If the only people who can read your web page copy are people in your industry, you’re doing something wrong. To keep your web page copy reader-friendly and accessible, get rid of industry jargon or unfamiliar words. While it may seem like this helps you sound smart or professional (see tip #4) it more commonly alienates entire segments of readers and hems your online writing in too tightly.

With that in mind, get rid of the jargon and use familiar, simple words to communicate your point. For help, use an editor like Grammarly or Hemingway to make alternate word suggestions and help you catch overly complicated sentences.

6. Research your keywords.

Keywords, once the center of on-page SEO, have fallen from grace a bit in recent years, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t important. In fact, keywords still work hard to guide Google and your readers to understand what your content is about. Think about it: when readers search for online content, they do so using a string of keywords.

For example, if I wanted to find a business that served coffee in NYC, I’d type, “coffee shop NYC” into Google. That’s a keyword phrase, and using keyword phrases that relate to your company and offerings is an excellent way to improve the conversion rates of your web content and help readers find what they’re looking for. If you need help researching keywords, use a tool like Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner tool, or get in touch with us to discuss our keyword research services!

7. Format your content correctly.

Again, online writing isn’t the same thing as novel writing, and you need to format your online material properly to help it to convert. Do the following things before you publish your web content:

Break your paragraphs into short chunks. Each paragraph should have a maximum of 4 sentences
Shorten your sentences by eliminating any unneeded words and phrases
Simplify your language by removing jargon
Swap out passive voice for active voice
Delete areas of repetition
Use second-person voice to appeal to readers

Learning how to write web content can be tough, but these simple bullet points will go a long way toward helping you format your content accordingly. This, in turn, will make it easier for your online visitors to read and engage with.

8. Arrange your web content to be cohesive.

One of the most-overlooked aspects of learning how to write web content is that people don’t interact with web content chronologically. This goes for your website as much as it does your blogs and social media material. Because of this, you’ll need to make sure you’re not organizing your content so that people must interact with it in a sequential manner.

Arrange your content so that it is independent and free-standing. Every page of your website, for example, should have a link to take visitors to the home page. Your content should read as an individual chapter of a book and you should include your name, address, and phone number information in everything you write.

9. Include visuals in your web page copy.

Learning how to write web copy isn’t all about writing –it’s about learning to use visual content, as well. On the one hand, “visual content” refers to formatting, which we already talked about. Good formatting makes your content appealing and can help draw in readers.

The other offshoot of visuals is images. Think stock photos, infographics, screenshots, memes, and more. The reason for including these things is simple: people get exhausted by reading dense bricks of text, and adding relevant visuals throughout a piece of content can help break it up and make it more approachable for readers.

That said, use compelling and informative visuals like graphics, photos, and screenshots to illustrate points and provide a visual break for readers.

10. Keep it friendly.

It’s easy to make web content too stuffy and unapproachable. To make it as exciting and welcoming as possible for your readers, keep it warm. Write the way you talk and don’t be afraid to infuse your individual personality into the web copy. It’ll help it convert better and be more memorable for your clients.

How to Write Web Copy The Right Way

There are dozens of wrong ways to write web copy, but these ten tips will help you ace yours right from the gate!

By learning what it takes to craft compelling web copy, you can help your brand or business stand out online – both now and in the future!

Need great web copy? Trust a pro team. We can help!

Website Content Writing 101: Stop Worrying About Keywords, & What to Focus on Instead

by Adam Oakley | Dec 25, 2013 | Website Content

If you, like me, have been in the world of website content writing services for a while, you remember a not-so-distant time when online writing was all about keyword inclusion.
Namely, how many keywords could you cram into a given web content page, and would Google notice?
While many marketers are still relying on tactics like these, Google and other search engines have changed drastically. It’s gotten to the point where marketers who have not evolved their content strategies are being left behind.
While Google used to rely on keyword inclusion as a reputable quality metric, today’s search engine algorithms are much more sophisticated. Today, Google looks at things like social signals, site quality, SEO, link strategies, image inclusion, content layout and length, besides just keywords.
While keywords still have an important place in the world of online content, focusing too much on keywords can come at the expense of your other content.
In light of this, it’s time to toss keyword reliance to the wind and to focus, instead, on all of the other things that make the world of web content writing go around.

Improve Your Content Writing on the Web By Focusing Less On Keywords Only

In the days of old, a page needed few things to rank well.
For one, it needed a high keyword saturation that helped Google interpret what the page was about. In addition to that, it needed a link strategy and some on-page content. That was about it.
Today, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Google has gotten amazingly advanced in the last several years, and sites that are to rank well in today’s version of Google need to have dozens of different high-quality ranking metrics, including good SEO, high-quality visuals, a solid social strategy, following, and base of shares, and a relevant, long-tail keyword strategy.
Unfortunately, marketers who are too busy focusing on things like keyword saturation and density often miss these nuanced things.

The Modern Face of SEO Web Content

Today, SEO is virtually unrecognizable to professionals who worked in the old SEO styling. Today, anything that’s considered to be solid in terms of SEO web content writing must optimize for two things: people and search engines.
If this sounds like a tall order – you’re right!
Modern SEO as a whole is complicated, and it requires a set of guidelines and a skilled team to execute it properly.
Here’s a list of some of the basic foundations of modern SEO content mapping, to help you get a feel for how it works today:

Modern SEO utilizes long-tail keyword phrases in natural ways
It optimizes for people first and search engines second
It seeks to provide value and solve problems rather than to sell directly
It gains its success from click-throughs, conversions, and shares
It is more conversational and less technical
It adapts frequently to changing consumer desires and needs

How to Improve Your SEO Web Writing Right Now: 5 Tips

When it comes to content writing for websites in the modern world, improving SEO generally means making the web content writing more functional and valuable.
While there are dozens of great ways to improve on-page content and ensure you’re making the most of common SEO standards and practices, the following steps are an excellent way to get started improving your SEO:

1. Get social with your web content writing

Social media is a key element in great SEO, and it’s one of the most important things for both humans and search engines of today. While social media is often written off as a waste of time or a platform that’s more suited to leisure than it is to marketing, the fact of the matter is that great SEO often starts on social media.
By using social platforms to distribute high-quality content, interact with followers, and build a base of devoted fans, it’s easy to improve your social following across the board and enjoy a boost in Google rankings, as a result.

2. Create a two-way dialogue in your online copy

Want to encourage customers to keep coming back to your web content? Show them that you appreciate their existing interaction!
While many companies brush over comments, likes, and shares, the trick to creating a successful online presence is to reach out and encourage engagement with your customers.
Have a new Instagram comment?
Take a moment to thank that person or company for taking the time to comment.
Have a new Facebook question or mention? Respond to it!
While this may not be directly an SEO writing tactic, it’s a simple step that can go a long way toward improving your overall visibility on the web and ensuring that your customers can find you, wherever they happen to be online.

3. Shoot for long-tail web content keywords

Right now, long-tail keywords make up 70% of all search volume.
Because of this, they’re a critical thing for marketers concerned about good SEO web content to target. While the whole point of this article is that it’s wise for marketers to avoid focusing on keywords too much, long-tail keywords are a wonderful thing to include in your overall content strategy.
Since long-tail keywords are highly specific, including them in your copy is a wonderful way to target it to your customers and boost your SEO by ensuring that the people who visit your site are qualified leads who are there because they’re ready to purchase or convert.

4. Beef up your linking strategy in your website content

Linking has been a fraught topic in the world of SEO for years.
Before SEO advanced to the point it’s at now, so-called black-hat SEOs used to stuff content full of spammy links to trick Google into ranking it well.
Since then, Google has cracked down on these exploitative practices. Today, links can benefit your copy, but they have to be executed correctly.
This means plenty of high-quality internal and outgoing links that point to other, valuable content and (in the case of outgoing links) sites with a high DA score.
This helps communicate to Google that your copy is reputable and that you’re tied into other legitimate sites on the web.

5. Create evergreen web content

Before we dive into the concept of evergreen content, let me just say that your best SEO strategy in the modern day is simply to create content – lots of it.
Every time you write a new blog, post a new web page, or develop a new article, you’re giving Google one more page to index.
This, in turn, helps boost your site’s relevance, ensure that your best content is appearing to your users, and allow you to feature more prominently in Google’s SERPs.
So, there you have it. Creating content, in general, is important, but creating evergreen content is critical.
Evergreen content is content with an incredibly long shelf life. Designed to provide value to readers for months or years after its original publishing date, evergreen content is the cornerstone of any good SEO or blogging strategy.
By creating plenty of evergreen content, you do two essential things: first, you give Google pages to index, which helps you pop up in the SERPs.
Second, you create in-depth, long-form pieces of content that can help your readers solve some of their most pressing and most common issues.
This, in turn, incentivizes them to come back to your site and continue interacting with your content, both today and in the future.
In these ways, evergreen content can help boost your SEO, improve your overall content strategy, and help you hop off of the keyword train for something better and more functional.

Web Content Writing Tip: Keywords Might Be Dead – And That’s Okay

Don’t get me wrong – a great long-tail web content focused keyword can still go a long way toward improving your content. But today, we’re thinking of it as more of a tool than a foundation.
In the web content writing world of the past, keywords were the end and the beginning.
Today, they’re just a strategy to improve writing, rather than one to create it.
Content writing on the web has evolved hugely, and, mostly, it’s been for the better. Today, search engines are smarter, readers are more interactive, and useful content is designed to cater to people first and computers second.
All of these things combine to ensure that content writing for a website reads more like a story than it does a dry, crunchy piece of “marketing material.”
As website content writing services have changed, though, some marketers have stayed stuck in the past – clinging desperately to all the things that used to work – including keywords.
Luckily, we don’t need to do this anymore.
Gone are the days of strained, density-focused keyword inclusion and marketers everywhere can do well to bid them a fond goodbye.
Today, great web content writing is all about value, relevance, interest, and – yes – beauty.
And it’s only by releasing our death grip on the outdated notion of keyword density that we’ll be able to grab all of those things.

Does your website content writing need a high quality copywriter? Get your web pages custom written at Express Writers today!