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If your website copy is good it can achieve great things. But it needs to do several things well – and at the same time. Knowing what your website copy could do can help you assess how successful it is. It’s all too easy to focus on one or two elements – or assume that once you’ve got your brand-new website up and running, it’s achieved its goal, and will continue to do so. Bear these points in mind and make sure your website copy is working for you.
What can the right website content do for your business?
- Avoid ambiguity or confusion about what you do and who you do it for
- Build trust, authority, and credibility
- Prove you offer added value
- Show you speak the same language as your target audience
- Engage that target audience
- Encourage your audience to take certain actions
- Drive organic website traffic (traffic that hasn’t been paid for)
Let’s take a look at how and why the right website copy can and should do all these thing
Is your website copy doing these things?
– Providing clear information
If the way you describe your services is confused, unclear, long-winded, full of jargon or lacking in sufficient detail, it will be difficult for people visiting your website to work out how exactly you might be able to help them. And if you don’t have clear calls to action or contact details, you’ll make it hard for them to know what to do next.
– Building trust, authority, and credibility
Professional SEO website copy with no errors in grammar, missing words, spelling mistakes, and so on, gives visitors the impression they are dealing with a professional company. This can help you compete with more established brands: when did you last see an error on a well-known brand’s website? A Global Lingo survey found that 74% of people ‘wouldn’t trust’ a company to do a good job, with 59% actively not buying from them.
Content that adds value also helps build trust, authority, and credibility: see the next point.
– Offering value
Your website shouldn’t just be a place where you display your wares and expect people to buy them. It should offer more than that. Give people additional information on and around your sector, subject, or expertise to help build that trust, authority, and credibility. It demonstrates you know what you are talking about, helps people understand how your services can benefit them, and gives something back.
Blogs are a great way to add that value and grow your organic traffic at the same time (see below).
– Targeting a specific audience
If your website content is designed to appeal to everyone, it’s likely to be too generic to appeal to the people you really want to connect with. It should speak directly to those people by using the right language and tone as well as being of interest to them specifically. You want as many of the right people visiting your website as possible to be potential buyers.
– Engaging your target audience
If you are talking to your target audience you should be speaking their language. But unless your content is interesting and engaging you won’t keep them reading long enough for them to decide you have what they’re looking for. Or even to realise you have something they didn’t even know they were looking for.
– Encouraging your audience to take certain actions
You might think that if you’re offering something, people will know they should buy it, sign up for it, ask for more information – whatever action it is you want them to take. But without the necessary prompts, and all the right information in all the right places, you could be making it difficult for people to know what to do or to bother to act.
Make sure you have clear, easy-to-action contact information on each page. What do you want people to do? Should they book a call, sign up to a service, give their email details? Encourage your website visitors to take the actions you would like them to take: don’t leave it to chance. People have very short attention spans online and will not waste time looking for ways to contact you or buy your service. Make it easy for them.
– Driving organic traffic
Don’t think of your website as a very expensive business card. It should be working for you and generating leads, not just sitting there going stale. With the right content and search engine optimisation (SEO), your website should be bringing in potential customers who are interested in what you have to offer.
Is your website copy helping to achieve your business goals?
If your website copy isn’t good it probably won’t be achieving your goals. Websites need the right content to start with – and then should be updated regularly with fresh, professionally written, SEO-friendly copy. If you have one without the other – or neither – you’re missing a trick and wasting a great resource.
Maybe it’s time for an SEO website copy audit to find out how you can improve your content. Your website has so much potential. If you are getting less organic traffic, it’s not converting, or you’re afraid it’s not showcasing your business as professional and trustworthy, we can look at how it could be improved.
Book a call or get in touch. Let’s get that website working for you!