How to Write Good Copy for your Website

Writing copy for your website is not exactly the same as writing copy for brochures or promotional literature. Of course you need to promote your business and make it as appealing as possible to potential customers just like you would in other literature, but you also have to think about promoting your website pages to search engines, which adds another dimension into your copywriting mix.

It isn’t as complex as it sounds, search engines will reward website pages that are written well and contain valuable information for your customers. If someone clicks onto your page and likes what is written there, they will be likely to come back to your site or click onto other pages. This is a good thing; in fact it is your goal. You want to give people a good, user-friendly copy and that is your main priority, so make sure that you focus on these three basics:

• Well-written, simple sentences that can be easily understood.

• Spelling! Nothing looks more amateurish than text peppered with spelling mistakes. Use a spell-checker before you add copy to your website pages. This is a simple thing to do and a must-do.

• Short, meaningful paragraphs. Large blocks of text can be off-putting, so make them short and pointed. People don’t want to have to search through lines of text to find what they are looking for, so make sure they don’t have to.

As well as following the basic guidelines you also need to make your copy attractive to search engines. You do this by focussing on key words and phrases, which the search engines will pick up on. The reward for including key words and phrases in a web page will be higher rankings in search engine listings e.g. when someone types in a word or phrase that is featured frequently in the copy of a page on your web site, this website page will appear in the search engine listings returned to the person searching for that word or phrase.

The optimal words or phrases to include in your copy for a web page are terms that someone searching for the service or information that you are offering on that particular page will type into a search engine. You can guess what people would search for, or you can better your odds by using a key word tool such as the one provided by Google (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) which will show you how many people have searched for a certain word or phrase and others similar to it.

Once you have a list of key words or phrases you can then start to craft your web copy around it. Remember that you will need to have different key words for different pages as every single page of your website will be listed with the search engines. So, if you own a B&B and want to write a page about the area that your business is situated in your keywords will be different to the keywords you have chosen for the page that you are writing about your room rates.

Think about what people will search for, put yourself in the mindset of your customer and you will be halfway there.
Writing the copy for each page is simple once you have chosen your key words. Try to include the key word or phrase more than once in your text for the page, so that it will be recognised by search engines. If you have chosen a phrase that doesn’t sit easily within a sentence like ‘B&B Torquay’ then use the phrase in a slightly different way so that is reads properly e.g. ‘We are a lovely B&B situated in Torquay’. The important thing is that the keywords feature in your copy, as often as possible and written in readable sentences. For this reason, you should only focus on one or two key words or phrases per page of website copy.

Finally, a word of warning! Don’t make the mistake of simply writing your key words over and over again without putting them into proper sentences. If you do this the search engines could mistake you for spammers and this will not help you, in fact it will have the opposite effect. As well as being a negative move for your search engine friendliness, this practice will also annoy your customers and they will simply click off your website and go somewhere else.

Good luck and happy writing!