Step 1: Taking time to understand your message
Before you pen any copy, it is important that you understand the business you are about to talk about. Take time to get a feel for what the company is about and make sure that your copy is representative of them, their brand and their messaging throughout.
Step 2: Offer summaries – Not essays
Stay within the recommended guidelines when writing web copy. Summarise information into eas-to-read bite sized chunks, watch your tone of voice in the context and lead from one piece of copy to the next. There are areas of course where you are free to talk as much as you want – the about us page, or your our history etc. But generally speaking you want no more than 50 – 250 words per service / product when first presenting users with new information.
Step 3: Structuring your website
Great copy is almost always completely wasted on you if your website is structured in a way that makes it difficult to find the information or difficult to navigate easily. The web is now awash with beautiful websites and because of this our standards have risen. In order to compete in this hugely competitive arena, it is no longer enough that your website looks nice; it needs to be structured correctly and offer users a constant flow of elegantly presented, original and relevant information.
Step 4: Taking the time to understand your audience
Google offers us a number of really cool analytical tools and these have allowed us to better understand our web traffic. Utilising tools like Google analytics and Google webmaster tools is absolutely essential to getting the most from your content and web pages. Once installed, check these tools often and analyse the data as best you can. Once you understand who is visiting your website, why? And which pages they are looking at and / or not looking at. You can make necessary changes to your web copy and continue t ensure that every page is pulling its weight.
Step 5: Don’t be afraid to show a little personality!
Where possible you should not be afraid to show a little personality in your web copy. That doesn’t just mean the ability to display a little humour, crack a joke or be generally upbeat in tone, but the importance of successfully projecting compassion, empathy and understanding. Tones should always be present and easy to identify in your writing style. This point in particular is more important today than ever before.
It can be a bit ‘needle in the haystack’ sometimes, especially for small to medium businesses just starting out with their content marketing strategy. But the key thing to take from this post is that you can make some inroads by taking a little time to go back and cover all of your bases. So long as you ensure you understand your message and your audience, it’s all just down to presentation and ensuring you have personality and flow to your copy. Most importantly, analyse, report and use the findings of Google analytics and Webmaster tools to enhance the quality of your data.
