10 Simple Ways to Improve Your Website Copy
A website is prime real estate for small businesses, as it allows you to control how you showcase your personality, your brand and your products or services. Your aim is to talk directly to your target audience, capture their attention and persuade them to ‘add to basket - but is it doing what it should? Below are 10 things you can do to enhance your website content, improve your SEO and sell yourself better to your customers.
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1. Who Are You Talking To?
Everything you write on your website should be directed at your target audience - who’s reading what you’ve written? Are you addressing them directly? By understanding your readers’ demographics, interests and pain points, you can ensure you use language and messaging that speaks directly to their needs and preferences.
2. Focus on the Benefits
Always highlight the benefits of your products or services, rather than just listing their features. Explain how your offerings solve problems or improve the lives of your customers to capture their interest and get those all-important conversions. Why should your audience choose you over anyone else? What makes your product or service beneficial to them?
3. Stay Clear and Concise
Use simple language and avoid unnecessary technical terms - remember you’re writing for your audience, not yourself, and they may not be familiar with the terminology used in your particular industry. Keep sentences and paragraphs short to improve readability and accessibility. Clear and concise product descriptions also help potential customers understand the benefits and features, leading to increased sales.
4. Use Compelling Headlines
Grab your website visitors' attention with clear, benefit-focused headlines that entice them to read further - consider, if you were reading this, what would make you stop and look? Use words and phrases that evoke emotion and curiosity to draw your readers in.
5. Enhance Your Blog Content
By producing regular, high-quality blog posts, you’ll soon attract more traffic to your website and establish your company as a thought leader in your particular industry. Aim to write longform content that provides valuable insights, answers common questions or addresses problems relevant to your target audience.
6. Incorporate Storytelling
A good way to engage site visitors is to use compelling stories that illustrate the value of your products or services in real-life scenarios. How can your readers use your product in their daily life? How is your service beneficial to people in a certain industry? Use case studies, customer stories or made-up scenarios to create an emotional connection with your reader and make your brand more relatable and memorable.
7. Include Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
You can prompt visitors on your website to take action with clear and persuasive CTAs strategically placed throughout your site. Use actionable language and create a sense of urgency - for example, ‘add to basket now’, ‘don’t miss out!’ and ‘grab yours today’ all encourage the reader to perform an action right there and then.
8. Consider SEO on Each Page
Incorporate relevant keywords naturally throughout your website content to improve your website's visibility in search engine results. Focus on providing valuable, relevant content that addresses common search queries in your industry - don’t just stick loads of keywords on the page and hope for the best, as Google will soon disregard you as a valuable source of information.
9. Showcase Social Evidence
You can easily build credibility and trust with your website visitors by including testimonials, reviews, case studies and social media mentions that demonstrate the positive experiences of past customers. Social proof helps reassure potential customers that you’re a good business to deal with and encourages them to take action.
10. Stay Consistent Across Platforms
Your company's messaging and tone need to remain consistent across all pages of your website, as well as across other marketing channels like social media, to reinforce your brand identity and enhance brand recognition. Read through all your copy to check that it’s consistent and all sounds like it’s been written by the same person and for the same audience.