How to Write Good Copy for Your Website
A suitable web copy allows you to tell your brand’s story, connect more profoundly to your customer base, control the brand narrative, and gain the viewer’s trust. The purpose of a website copy is to entertain and educate your audience with just the right amount of information. So how to write good copy for your website?
If you take things too far, a large portion of your viewers will drive away immediately. If you make the web copy too obscure, you might not reach your goal of educating potential customers.
You’ll need to know some of the best copywriting practices, understand how to prepare a copy deck, apply keyword research and use these keys to target your audience, and follow wireframes and templates to make the content uniform and easy to read.
In continuation, we’re going to discuss some of the best copywriting practices that’ll make your web copy more compelling and informative.
How to Write a Good Copy for Your Website
Focus on benefits instead of features
Almost every company makes a major mistake by spending a lot of time talking about its greatness. We all want to brag about our qualities, but that won’t get potential customers interested in your brand.
Let’s put ourselves into your viewers’ shoes: they’re not very likely to have come to your website to hear you brag about your accomplishments. Instead, people are here to learn how they will benefit from your products or services, so that’s what you need to focus on.
With that said, you shouldn’t spend too much time explaining the specific features of your products and services. What you should do is tell the reader how those features are going to solve their problems. If you don’t tell them the benefits, your audience will be left with their assumptions, which might not be as favorable as you could make them seem.
Place yourself at the customer’s level
The writing tone and style are vital when writing a website copy, as they become your brand’s voice. These writing features are an excellent way to establish consistency across different communication channels; they can also help you sound more persuasive. That’s why it is vital that you place yourself at the customer’s level and use the voice of the customer to address your audience.
The voice of the customer is a market research technique that prioritizes your customers’ needs. It is a way to bring the expectations for your products closer to the customers by speaking in their language.
Reading customer reviews and conducting surveys are excellent ways to gather data that’ll help you speak in the voice of the customer. By reading what your audience has to say, you’ll get a sense of their needs and expectations, which you can use in many different ways other than finding your company’s voice.
Before you start crafting the voice of your customer, you’ll need to identify several key points, including the problems your audience is faced with, what they’re expecting from a potential solution, other desires that your products can satisfy, and some memorable quotes coming from user experiences.
Be (more) concise
We understand that you probably have a lot to say to your (potential) customers, but the headline isn’t the place to unleash your writing capacity. Nobody likes to read an endless web copy, and with attention spans getting shorter, you should try to keep things as simple as possible. Headlines should only be used to make the reader want to keep on reading, and nothing more than that.
Therefore, headlines should be as short and compelling as possible. Once again, use the voice of the customer to address your audience directly, and you shouldn’t have any difficulties keeping their attention.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most of the people accessing your website are probably using a mobile device. Reading extensive body copies on a mobile device can be challenging and nerve-wracking, and that’s probably not what you want to achieve.
To keep your customers content and interested, you should know precisely what you want to say and say it in as few words as possible.
Get the readers to engage
The main reason you’re writing a web copy in the first place is to stimulate your audience to take action. Before you set a direct call to action, make sure you have your priorities straight and know exactly what you want users to do. Once you’ve set your goal, you can set up a clear and direct call to action.
Most of your attention should be focused on a single verb that expresses what you want the users to do, so things are clear for them as well. If a button downloads an app, be as concise as possible, and name it “Download App.” There are many cases where you’ll need to add more context, which is perfectly fine.
Find a suitable place to add an explanation so your audience has all the required information. But when naming buttons or links, make sure you keep things as clean and simple as possible.
Keeping up a well-organized copy deck is mandatory for writing a good web copy. Google Docs is an excellent tool that facilitates collaboration, making it easy to write drafts and share them with the team and stakeholders. It allows you to gather feedback and organize your workload.
Once the web copy enters the final stage, you should share it with your stakeholders. Have them review the copy deck and leave their feedback. With their input, you can finalize your web copy by reviewing it again, looking for further changes, running a spell and grammar check, updating the table of contents, and running an A/B test on your strongest pages, like product overview pages or the FAQ section.
Now that you learned how to write good copy for your website, you should be able to create compelling content for your audience. By completing the above steps, you should have a powerful web copy that’ll significantly improve the user experience, making it much more actionable.
