12 Tips for Writing Optimized Website Content
Getting a readers’ interest with good website content is hard. You need to catch their attention and show value to keep them hooked. Most visitors will spend just a few seconds on a web page before deciding what to do next.
A well-thought-out website writing strategy is the key to beating these odds. Well-written content that’s optimized for the web not only rises to the top of search results but also holds readers’ attention when they are on your website.
Read on to find out how to make your main web copy stand out from the crowd, capture your audience's attention, and contribute to your efforts to increase your market share.
What is Web Copy?
Website copy usually refers to the main body of text on your website, intended to sell your product or service. It's the words that guide your visitors through the site, explain your brand concept, and tell people about your services. Typically, these main pages include the Homepage, About Us, Services Page, and FAQs.
So, what makes good website content?
Your web copy should match the search intent of your potential customers. You want to help them solve their problem and take action – make a purchase, subscribe to your blog, or join your mailing list.
Follow these tips to make sure your website content gets the attention it deserves.
1. Determine your purpose.
The most important thing for any writer is to understand their purpose. Understanding your end goal from the outset helps you craft the perfect piece of content and an ideal call-to-action statement.
The objective of the copy supports the goals of the business. So, find your answers to the questions about it:
Is the intent to sell a product or a service?
Is the focus on building traffic with the intention of increasing advertising revenue or sponsorships?
Is it aimed at attracting new clients and generating leads?
Is the main objective to attract subscribers or build a community?
2. Know your audience
It sounds easy, but a lot of people put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—before thinking about who it is that they’re trying to reach. Before you start drafting, ask yourself these questions:
Who is my primary audience?
Is there a secondary audience who can influence and inform my primary audience?
How will they find my website online?
For example, let’s say you’re creating an online portfolio. Your primary audience might be your existing clients. However, your secondary audience is much broader and could include other individuals or businesses who might need your services in the future. You’ll need to make sure your content is both accessible and interesting to all these people.
To write copy that hooks your potential customers, you need to get into their mindset:
Who are the people coming to your site?
What kinds of problems do they want to solve?
What search terms would they type into a search bar?
You will get traffic to your website via different sources — social media, links from other websites, email sharing, and search engines. That last method is especially important when you write for the web. The text could be extremely well-written and informative, but if it’s not optimized for search engines, chances are few people will find it. Think of your audience again:
What search terms would they type into Google?
If you’re posting a resume online, what kind of jobs are you looking for? Make sure to include those terms in the headline and sub-headers.
If you can learn to write in ways your visitors speak or search, you can start creating optimized content that will help you build a relationship of trust with your audience.
3. Know your competitors.
It's always a good idea to do some research on your competition. It’s very likely that visitors to your website will also consider your competitor, so you need to make an informed decision about the kind of content you would like to offer on your website. Doing some research beforehand is an excellent way to spot trends among competitors and strategize your next move.
The easiest way to go about it is to simply search for your main offering (product, service, or topic) on Google, note which websites rank on the top, and learn from what they are doing. Here are a few things you should look out for:
What is the primary service being offered?
What type of content is being used on the main pages – success stories, videos, statistics?
What is their target audience?
4. Follow the “Upside-Down Pyramid” model
Audiences online have very short attention spans—they’ll decide whether your site has the information they need or not in a matter of seconds. Try structuring your content like an upside-down or inverted pyramid. The most important messages go at the top of the page. Then, gradually drill down to the more specific, supporting information.
You can start your copy with some kind of exciting data, a question, or even a one-sentence story. Make sure people are hungry for more content after reading the introduction.
5. Make the text scannable
Most people skim read, so to ensure that the text is easily scannable, you should include headers, bulleted and numbered lists, descriptive subheadings, and white space between paragraphs.
Instead of text-heavy paragraphs, use bulleted or numerical lists. Instead of one long page of text, organize content into labeled tabs.
Always include “white space.” This is the empty space that surrounds paragraphs, images, and other elements on your web page. Though it may seem like this is just wasted space, it’s actually a web designer’s best friend. Comfortable amounts of white space around text make it more legible, and more enjoyable to read.
It’s also important to divide content into sections with descriptive sub-headers. For example, a webpage about climate change might organize information under the following headings:
What Is Climate Change?
Drivers of Climate Change
Current and Projected Impacts of Climate Change
Solutions to Reduce Emissions
Learn More
These sub-headers not only help readers navigate the page, but they’ll also help search engines find your content.
6. Help your readers navigate.
As mentioned earlier, there are multiple paths through which audiences find web content. It could be from a post shared on social media, via links on other websites, via a marketing email, or through a search engine results page.
People who receive your message might not be that familiar with your brand. It will be helpful for your readers if you make it clear what your business offers and put relevant links for further details in your copy.
7. Focus on creating a bond with your readers.
Create a bond between your brand and the client using certain techniques such as:
Active voice: use sentence structure like “You can order our products here” instead of “Our products can be ordered here.” The passive voice is relevant when you want to sound more formal; in other cases, use the active voice to sound more personal. Active voice helps create crisp, reader-friendly sentences.
Address them directly: use “you” to address your reader/ audience, “we” to speak from the point of view of a company, and “I” for an individual voice.
8. Keep it simple.
Most importantly, keep your copy simple. Research from The Literacy Project tells us that the average American reads at the 7th to 8th-grade level. If you use simple language, your audience is more likely to understand and remember the information.
Again,
Use short sentences – communicate your message clearly.
Limit the use of adverbs and adjectives in order to keep sentences short and snappy.
Avoid using jargon – not all readers are experts, so replace professional terminology with simpler alternatives and provide hyperlinks to other articles with relevant info.
Give examples – readers better visualize your messages with examples rather than high-level statements.
If you’re not sure about judging your own writing, then you can use an online readability tool. Most of the popular models are based on the length of words and sentences in a text. Your text’s readability is then scored by a number or an education level.
These three tools will scan your text and score its readability:
Can your text be easily understood at a 7th to 9th-grade reading level? Check how it scores on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level to find out.
9. Grammar check is important.
Make sure your copy is free from spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors. Sloppy mistakes can put off potential customers. Microsoft word or third-party tools like Grammarly can help you improve your writing.
10. Incorporate visuals.
People remember only 20% of what they read, but 80% of what they see and do. Adding infographics, pictures, graphs, or videos to your copy will help your target audience process information faster and help you grab their attention.
11. Optimize for search engines.
While it's important to write for your human audience, it's not wise to completely ignore Google. You should optimize content for the audience and ensure that the relevant keywords are included in titles, subheadings, and meta descriptions.
It would also be helpful if you spent some time learning about the basics of SEO. Mainly,
Including keywords in headlines and sub-headers
Understanding metadata.
Improving the readability of your URLs.
Adding relevant and helpful links/ backlinks.
Optimizing your visual content.
Click here to learn more about the basics of SEO.
12. Keep your website updated.
This goes without saying, you should regularly review your content strategy to ensure that your web copy stays updated. You should:
Refresh your content regularly.
Update your outdated banners or CTAs.
Repurpose your content.
Optimize internal linking.
Those were some key tips for ensuring that your web copy is optimized for the web. By keeping it simple and focusing on your reader while remembering the importance of SEO, you have a better chance of getting more visitors to your website and then converting them into customers.