How to make your website copywriting work hard for your business.
If your website is performing well, you should have a constant flow of new and returning clients and customers heading to its pages. If not, why not? Let’s talk about the power of copywriting to improve the performance of your website.
Your website is where your customers become invested in your greatness. It’s where your ideal punters and purchasers find you and pledge their ultimate allegiance – buying your product or signing up to your services.
You might invest in SEO, programmatic advertising, planning your social media calendar and other marketing activity but your your website holds all of the information a new client or customer might need to make a purchase decision, and as they say – information is power.
Your website holds the power to communicate and retarget those that have shown an interest in your business to ultimately seal the deal, whether that’s through a contact form, a call or other dedicated sales channel.
Your website copy should reflect your brand, and it’s not enough just to have a pretty website. Thoughtful, efficient and attention grabbing website design is important, in addition your customer journey should well thought through, providing them with all of the information they need to make a decision. That’s where copy has the potential to build your brand and relationships with your customers or prospects.
In short, if your copy isn’t performing, you may be losing clients online.
Web copy sells, but remember people buy benefits – not features.
What IS copy writing? Copywriting is the effective use of words online to deliver a valuable and entertaining or informative message to your audience.
Great copy has the power to put the spotlight on your customer – focussing on their needs and challenges rather than talking about what YOU do. Your purpose is (or should be) to solve your customers’ problems.
Your website copy can offer solutions to the problems that your customers face which in turn increases the chance of them taking up your offer, or buying your product or service.
Your customers want to feel seen, heard & acknowledged. Longer form copy on your website such as information pages or blog posts can harness this insight and ensure that your customers and clients know that what you’re selling is something that they can identify with.
Identifying your target audience and their pain points, defining what you can offer to resolve their issues, and writing your website copy in such a way as to grab their attention, create interest and get your audience to take action is key to ensure that your website is not only well designed, but harnessing the power of copy to grow your business.
Copywriting informs visitors about your brand and gives detailed information about your product or services – BUT, does it answer their questions and provide solutions to their challenges?
Rethink your homepage and navigation from customers point of view – what are they looking for and what can you help them find using words that are simple clear and customer focussed. Clarity beats clever or cute any day of the week.
In practice this might look like a homepage headline that states “We are the go to modern day gurus of career development.” Does it answer your customer questions and concerns?
Flipping the example above, this might look like: “Need career advice to find your money making super powers? Let me show you how to get your workplace passion back”.
You might have heard the adage – features tell, benefit tell. Clear and consistent copy will focus on benefits over features. Focusing on the advantages of your service or product would explain features and how it will solve a problem, often in a very factual way. Benefits however, appeal to the emotional and subjective pains or challenges of your prospects.
The copy on your website should clearly define the feature itself, describe how the feature is a benefit and why it’s better than your competitors and then prompt your prospective buyer or client to think about what they’re missing out on and take action.
Unfortunately only Google knows quite how their algorithms work, but global SEO institutions such as Yoast, Backlinko and Search Engine Journal estimate that a word count over 1400 result in higher rankings.
However, if you want to rank your website on Google think quality over quantity. Truth is – it’s not about maximum wordcount. Depending on your subject matter, you’ll need anywhere from 600 – 4000 words to cover a topic in-depth, and with multiple keyword variations.
That said, the longer your content, the more keyword variations you can include. Longer content produces higher search rankings. Simply put, studies show that longer content dominate the first page of search rankings.
At a basic level Google processes the text that is on the web pages by extracting keywords from the pages which is then categorized into various topics, Google then use many other cues to understand the authority and integrity of the page.
Nowadays, the way people use search engines has evolved – think about the last time you asked Google a question, how did you phrase it?
The way we now phrase our enquires means that Google algorithms have evolved to answer questions more like a human, this means that it’s now more important than ever to write content that is clear and that gives a contextual meaning.
Of course backlinks, SEO and digital advertising have their part to play, but if your copy is clear and answers your customer’s needs, you’re well on your way to improving your rankings in search, which means more of your customers will find you.
If your copy is convincing, and you’ve put your customer at the centre of your business solutions you will be able to craft a customer journey that leads to conversions. You can encourage users to:
