Your website might be the most crucial marketing of your brand.
That’s right! Because a website is important for every stage of a buyer's journey, your web copy has to cater to more than one type of user at a time.
Copywriting isn't just putting words into a spot; there is a real science behind what words you choose and where you put them. When Hubspot changed one CTA from "Start My Free Trial" to "Start Your Free Trial,” they saw an increase in clicks by 90%!
As you can see, creating an engaging website isn’t as easy as it seems. After all, users don’t want to work to understand what you’re offering them. By making minor changes to your website copy, such as focusing on benefits instead of features, or using an “active” voice, your audience will be more inclined to keep reading.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the smaller changes you can make to your small business website that can improve its overall performance.
What Is Website Copywriting and Why Is It Important?
Many business owners spend all their time and money on website design but ignore optimizing and creating an engaging website for their audience. Yes, a professional-looking design is essential to the business's success, but it’s only half the equation. Good copy is equally important, and you could argue more critical in some cases.
Every single line of copy on your website should help your visitors accomplish or learn something. Since most of your visitors won’t be reading every line of your website, each line or piece of information should have a specific purpose.
When your audience finds your web copy engaging and worth reading, search engines notice this and start to see your website as a better source of information. As you can see, your website copy directly impacts your SEO and search engine rankings!
Now that we understand why creating high-quality copy is important for your website performance, let’s learn five simple ways to improve it quickly…
Make Your Copy and Content Scannable
When you walk into a store and pick up an item, you expect the packaging to explain exactly what the product offers.
Your website should do the same thing.
As much as we want people to read every word we write, it's just not logical. The average website session is between 2 and 3 minutes, meaning our audience wants to know the answer to their question fast.
By breaking your website down into bitesize pieces, using bullet points, bolding important information, and creating easy-to-understand copy, your audience can make quicker decisions and feel better about your brand.
Emphasize Your Benefits Over Your Features
We've written about this in the past, but ensuring your copy focuses on the benefits of using your brand over the features is one of the fastest ways to improve your website copy.
Features and benefits are sometimes hard to distinguish for those writing their own web copy. While they might be similar, they are entirely different psychologically.
Your website copy is how your visitor learns everything about your brand and products or services before using your company. When you change your copy to focus on the benefit of using your service, booking with your company, or buying your product, users can better see their pain points being solved.
A/B Test Your Copy Copywriting With Your Audience
While we like to think we know everything about our customers, sometimes making minor changes to your website copy can increase your conversion, decrease your bounce rate, or have other positive effects. By A/B testing aspects of your web copywriting, you'll be able to optimize your site for top conversions.
A/B testing, otherwise known as split testing, is a type of experiment where you pin two or more aspects of something against each other, with minor changes being the key difference—for example, testing the colors of your CTAs to determine which converts higher.
Use Your Brand's 'Active Voice'
Your website copy should engage the reader and inspire action. Generally speaking, readers respond better to sentences written in an active voice. Why?
Two big reasons: briefness and clarity.
But don’t worry, writing in an active voice is much simpler than some believe! In active voice, the subject performs the action stated by the verb. Because of this, your sentence will always use fewer words than a passive voice sentence.
Subject + Verb + Object
Passive voice sentences often require additional words such as “was,” “by,” or “be”, to ensure the statement makes sense.
Here is an example:
Zoek Marketing (subject) creates (verb) quality websites (direct object).
Quality websites (object) are created (verb) by Zoek Marketing (subject).
Personalize Your Call-to-Action Buttons
A CTA (or Call-to-Action) is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take a specific desired action. While CTAs often present themselves are buttons, technically any actionable item on your website can be a CTA.
However, we do recommend making all CTAs buttons, as they are proven to increase conversions. If you haven't already, that is your first step!
Your second step is to personalize it. We don't mean by including names or specific information about the users, but by tailoring it to the content around it. The best call-to-actions are simple but effective. It's the last push your audience needs to convince them to make a purchase.
Key Takeaways
These tips can help you create a more engaging and user-friendly experience for your audience, but this is only the beginning! Not only do you need to follow these steps, but you also have to ensure the copy you’re writing is high-quality.
So how do you create a high-quality copy? If you have time and a desire to learn, you can learn how to write engaging copy yourself! However, If you’re not confident about your writing ability, the safest thing to do is to hire a great copywriter.
A professional copywriter has the experience and know-how to create copy that will not only be great for visitor retention, it’ll also attract search engines, and improve your conversions.
If you need help improving your website copy, click the link below to learn how Zoek Marketing can help.
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