Writing web copy is easy.
Well, it’s easy in the same way that flying a plane is easy – there’s a bit you need to learn first, and you need to practice a lot, but once you have, it will come so naturally to you that you can do it drunk.
(This is tongue in cheek, of course. We’re not really comparing writing website copy to flying a plane, and I would like to stress that you should never, ever, be intoxicated when you attempt to write copy)
But, there’s more to it than just writing well and using slightly offensive similies. In order to craft web copy that works, you need to engage, compel and motivate. And we’re here to help you do that.
So, buckle up and strap yourself in as we walk you through the top 5 tips for web copy success.
5 tips to writing kickass website copy that converts
1. Understand your brand voice
This is a step that so many people seem to skip, and their copy is basically unreadable as a result.
We live in a world now where we can spot a hard sell a mile off, and we don’t like it. We don’t want to listen to a boring sales pitch – we crave authenticity.
So much crap copy is published without a thought given to who these words actually belong to. You end up with a pseudo-professional estimate of what the writer thinks a generic business should sound like.
It’s out of date, it’s boring and no one wants to read it. It doesn’t work.
Before you write anything for your website, from landing page to blog post, really think about the persona of your business – how do you want to portray yourself, and how can you add that personal touch to your writing?
Think about your prospective customers – who do they want to hear from? They’re under no obligation to read your website copy. You need to speak to them in a way that informs and entertains. The competition for attention on the internet is pretty intense, given that it pretty much covers everything that has ever happened (and every single person’s hot take on it…).
If you’re a freelance copywriter, make sure that brand voice is the first thing you ask about when you work with a new client.
Do they know their target audience? Do they have an idea of what their potential customers want to read?
Getting all of this sorted before you start work can save you a helluva lot of time after you’ve sent that first draft.
And if you’re a business, your lives will be made so much easier with clearly defined guidelines that describe your tone of voice. That one document can be used as a reference for everything – every blog post, every website page, every social media post – every written word from your company.
With clear guidelines on your tone of voice, you take full control over how your company is perceived by your target audience. Create a profile of your target audience – your buyer persona – and then write what you think they would like to read.
2. Get to the point
We’re a generation of lazy readers. With so much online content available at our fingertips, if something looks too long, or too wordy, we’ll just move on to something else.
Your audience will be scan reading your content, so you must make content scannable. Don’t make it difficult for them to dig out the relevant information, make it obvious.
The good news is that there are plenty of easy ways to make your web copy snappy and punchy. The even better news is that they’re listed below:
Put the essential information at the start of paragraphs – don’t make your readers search for it. If more information is needed, cover it in no more than a couple of sentences.
Use bullet points: a great way to break up large blocks of text, while at the same time highlighting key points
Headings and subheadings: A great way to signpost your audience to the information they are looking for, and another way to break up long streams of words.
While you may find it irresistible to showcase your extensive knowledge of the English language, and your unrivalled ability to articulate yourself with delightfully flowery language, you may discover that those that have chosen to read your online marketing materials find them to be somewhat tiresome to read, and choose to divert their attention to the literature of your competition. You may consider, therefore, that a shortened version of your thoughts might tantalise them in a more effective manner. Or, to put it another way…
Use simple words to make your point. Don’t make people struggle to understand you, make it crystal clear.
Images can help you to illustrate your point. They say a picture is worth a thousand words – just don’t try to include them in your invoice if you’re a freelance copywriter working on a per word contract.
Be bold. Really make the key points of your article jump off the page to your readers – make them bold.
Check spelling. Nothing will undermine your authority more than making basic spelling and grammar mistakes. There are plenty of tools out there to help you with this, from browser extensions to informative and extremely helpful articles on common grammar mistakes like this one.
Avoid keyword stuffing. If you are trying to attract more site visitors, you will have done your keyword research to help with SEO. The temptation will be to cram these words in as many times as possible into your web copy. Don’t do this. Search engines have cottoned on to this, and keyword stuffing is more likely to harm your search ranking than improve it. Plus, it really isn’t interesting to read the same word over and over again.
You will find examples of these techniques everywhere you look – anyone that grabs your attention is worth learning from, so really look at how they do it.
3. Tell your target audience how they will benefit
It’s not all about you, you know?
In fact, as far as the reader is concerned, it’s not about you at all. It’s about them. You’ve heard the phrase “the customer is always right”? Well, now the customer isn’t just always right, they are everything.
Now, I know the temptation – you’ve spent years developing your product and you want to shout from the rooftops how hard you have worked, what the process was like, the many failed attempts, the amazing discoveries, the blood, sweat and tears that you have poured into it.
Unfortunately, no one cares.
Okay, maybe not no one, but a huge majority of your target audience doesn’t care. They’re thinking “okay – what’s in this for me?”
If they’re on your website it is because you have their attention – and most people spend between 10-20 seconds on a web page before they move on. They are not going to hang around just to find out how great you are, they want something for themselves.
Take the focus off yourself and put it on them. How can you make their lives better? What is it about what you are offering them that makes you better than your competitors?
In order to be a successful copywriter, you are going to need to have a deep understanding of your target audience and why your web copy is going to improve their lives.
A good example of this would be if you were writing about some small business accounting software. It will be packed full of features that do all kinds of clever accounting things:
- Invoicing
- Expenses
- Estimates
- Bills
- VAT
- Sales orders
- Purchase orders
- Reporting
- Vendor portalzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Are you still there?
How about if instead of listing the features we said something like:
Spend less time staring at a spreadsheet and more time doing the work you love with our amazing new accounting software! We’ll take care of the boring stuff while you get out there and earn more money.
You take the focus off yourself and on to the benefits. Your customers can quickly and easily see how you can help them before they even get to lists of features.
This doesn’t mean you should omit more detailed product descriptions completely, but good copywriting involves getting the key benefits early, before then directing them to the relevant pages for more detailed information.
4. Build trust
Did you know that in 2017, an organisation called The International Internet Trust and Accountability Regulators (IITAR) was set up to fact check websites and social media in an effort to uphold truth and integrity on the internet?
No? Well, that might be because, like an awful lot of what is written on the internet, it’s not true. Obviously. (Not that this will stop people from believing it if we said it enough).
The point is that we have become naturally very cynical of what we read on the internet. With good reason, but it does mean that part of the battle for copywriters is that we need to establish trust with our audience when we write website copy. So how do we go about that?
Back it up with facts
Facts still hold weight in the modern world. Once you have said what you want to say in your own words, back it up with some facts – even linking to your sources to give it that extra bit of authority.
It should go without saying that you should be confident in your sources, and only quote and link to them if you are sure that they are accurate. Just what represents a trustworthy site, we will have to leave to your own common sense.
Use graphs and graphics
A graph is a brilliant way to help your audience understand facts and figures when you are writing copy.
So many people are ‘visual thinkers’ which means they can digest much more information when it is displayed as a graph or illustration, rather than in a chunk of text. This means you can quickly make a point, and then quickly reinforce your point with a little image.
As readers, we love a graph. Maybe they make us think we are being clever when we can understand them – like we’ve solved a tiny puzzle in half a second.
Whatever the science behind it, graphs and images are a great way to help build trust with your reader.
Take a look how Neil Patel uses graphics to reinforce his argument and add depth to his content:
Be trustworthy
This may seem obvious, but it’s really important. I mentioned above how we have become very wary of pushy sales copywriting – this can manifest itself in distrust.
“If their product is so good, why are they being so pushy?”
There’s more than that though – in order to build trust with our audience we need to prove that we can be trusted. The whole journey of your customer is included – from clicking a link that actually takes you to the correct page to fulfilling your value proposition and delivering what your reader wants.
Your brand voice will dictate this as well – are you too corporate, do you promise too much for what you can deliver? Think about good examples of who you trust on the internet, and work out how they pull it off.
Most importantly, just be honest.
Social proof
Humans are a social species. We feel more comfortable when we are in a group.
So show your readers who is in your group and how happy they are. Reviews from existing customers are one of the most powerful tools when it comes to building trust with prospective customers.
Where appropriate include testimonials and reviews – make sure they are authentic, of course. Even if they don’t quite work in the main text, you can include them all over your site, especially on your home page.
5. Work on your call to action
Ultimately, the holy grail for copywriting is converting your readers into customers – that is what it all boils down to.
The key to this is a good call to action – a quick instruction for your reader on what to do next, and why they should do it.
You don’t want your readers having to search through pages of text to find what they need to do – people are lazy so they will get bored and move on to something else. You need to get them there and then.
There are many different results from a call to action – it may be to buy a product or just sign up to a weekly newsletter, but it should always follow a few rules:
Start with a verb
Doing words get people doing things.
Whatever people say, we are actually quite happy to do what we’re told. If you start your CTA with a verb, your readers are more likely to jump into life.
Check out these two examples and see for yourself which one is better:
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Or…
Sign up for our newsletter today for a sneak peek at our new product range!
Keep it simple
Like all good writing, less is more when it comes to CTAs. Look at any popular brand and you will see a good example of how short CTAs can be:
HelloFresh: SELECT THIS BOX
Spotify: GET 3 MONTHS FOR £0
Obviously, it helps when you have a world-renowned brand behind you, but these show you how simple your CTAs need to be.
Make the most of FOMO
Nobody likes the feeling that they’re going to miss out on something, and this is played upon in all manners of copywriting.
It’s one to handle with care, though, because if you go overboard here you may lose a lot of that trust that you had built up in the copy itself. The key is to be subtle and to let the reader join the dots themselves.
To use our example above, you might want to say:
Sign up for our newsletter today to be one of the first to look at our new product range!
The implication is that if you are not one of the first, then you may miss out…
Hit them when they’re hooked
The temptation might be to put a CTA right at the top of your page so that people can click on it straight away. While there is nothing wrong with this, you will probably find that you will get more visitors converting to customers if you have it at the end of your copy.
The reason for this is that if you have kept them engaged and interested in the main body copy, then they are much more likely to respond to a CTA than if you ask them to do something as soon as they arrive on the page.
You will have built up the trust throughout the page, so that is the time to request action.
Now go and write good web copy!
We’ve listed above some great tips for writing great website copy. Couple these with a well-planned content strategy, and you will attract more people to your website, and convert more readers into customers.
Even with this great advice, though, you won’t get it right straight away – it takes time and a lot of practice. In fact, the best advice for writing great web copy is to just start writing web copy. Get started and analyse where you can improve.
Great copywriting examples are everywhere – you just need to know when you see them.
If all of this seems a bit much – we get it. Sometimes it’s easier to get someone else to fly your plane rather than learning to do it yourself! We can help you there – get in touch with us and we can make your web copy really take off.
