Have you ever sent a detailed email to someone and they come back to you with questions about the content you literally just sent them?
The reality is that people are just overwhelmed with the onslaught of content and information they just skim read. In the hope that they digested just enough information to proceed to the next step,
This makes writing copy for a website that much more complicated, how are you going to get your message across if nobody is going to read it?
The good news is, you still can.
Here are some of the best practice tips to help you get your content web-ready.
Know Your Audience
If you don’t know who you are talking to then stop right now, pause and go back a few steps until you have identified who your audience is. If you are building a website around your users, you need to know everything about them. What problem are you solving for them, what are their needs/wants/preferences?
When you know your audience, you will know what terminology they will understand, what lingo they will respond to and how you can talk to them. A restaurant audience, for instance, will have a much more relaxed even cheeky tone as opposed to the tone you will use for a legal website.
Use Bullet Points
You have approximately 15 seconds to grab your user’s attention and make them stay on your website. If you haven’t convinced them to hang around in less than 1 minute, you have lost them.
Use bullet points to highlight your USP’s (Unique Selling Points) and solve their problem right away, they will immediately want to know more.
When preparing your copy, write down everything you want to say and then pick out the important messages you want to get across into bullet points.
Keep Paragraphs Short
Remember the part where we said that people don’t read, we meant it. Make your information short, snappy and easy to read.
Break your paragraphs up into multiples and then push your key messages to the front. Start with your most important points and then move on from there.
Use Headings
Think of a heading a summary of the content within the paragraph below. Many people won’t even read past the headings, just scan the headlines and move on.
Grab their attention with the heading and you might be able to keep them there to read the rest.
Pack Your Suitcase
When you travel you end up packing back around 75% of the things you thought you absolutely needed to take with you and when you are traveling you wish you packed 75% less of what you actually took.
When you start preparing your copy, pack everything out just like you are packing your suitcase. Just let it all out, write the 30 pages you want to and then get ruthless.
Slash the fluff a by half and then do it again until you are sitting with a fraction of what you started with. Now you are ready to start preparing your copy.
When not to use a Copywriter
✔ If you write content regularly for websites
✔ If you have an in-depth understanding of SEO
✔ If you are comfortable with deadlines
✔ If you know what H1 is and how to use it
✔ If you know how to do keyword research
Copywriting not your thing? Let our in house copywriter handle your writing and SEO tasks so you don’t have to.
Take me to your Copywriter.
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