How to Write Great Website Content

Writing Great Copy

Writing great website content is an art form. Brands have made incredible profits from skillfully written copy that drives customers to take action. Conversely, money has been lost from companies who do not use copywriting effectively.

Good copywriting spans over almost all marketing channels, from radio scripts that reach millions of listeners, to billboards that are seen by countless commuters and commercials that are broadcast to vast audiences. Why is good copywriting important? Words have power. Words can persuade.

The primiary goal of copywriting is to get the reader to read the next line…repeat

If you’re a website owner, congratulations, you have the opportunity of putting great copy into your own slice of internet real estate. The effectiveness of this copy will decide how website visitors perceive and engage with you, which means it is vital for your own online success.   In this post, we’re going to look at the elements of effective copy for your website.

You can choose to implement these ideas yourself or reach out to company like us to help you along the way.

What is your Goal?

If you’re writing copy for your website, you need to decide what you want your copy to achieve. Are you communicating the benefits of your products to convert visitors into buyers? Are you seeking sign-ups to a webinar, email list or your social following?

Deciding what your goal is will shape the words you write, as your goal is focused on communicating your message.   Have your goal in mind? HubSpot gives you the tips to write compelling copy to convert your readers.

Understanding Who You’re Writing For

Knowing your audience is crucial to writing effective copy. Knowing who you’re writing for will shape the content, tone, length and type of language you’ll use. If you run a business website and you have a brick and mortar shop under the same name, you’ll be able to understand who your target market is easily from your own real-life experiences and interactions with customers.

If your business is website only, it may be more challenging to know what your readers expect until you have more experience. There are some fantastic survey tools such as Google Forms and SurveyMonkey that you can utilize to gather information on your readers.

If you have an email mailing list, social following or customer database, mailing them a simple survey to gather personalized information is extremely valuable. This can help you discover what they’re interested in reading, what problems they have that you can solve and what informs their decisions.

The most important thing to remember is to get the most important information on your website above the fold. Above the fold means everything you see on the website when you first land on it before you scroll down.

The most common details above the fold usually include who you are, what you do, what services you offer, contact information, why you do what you do, why you are better than the rest, or how you do what you do. I would also suggest studying your competitors “above the fold” copy and then visiting some fortune 500 brand swhom you admire as well.

Reader Profile

Whether you’re using a survey or making your own informed judgement, creating an ideal reader profile can be useful in deciding who you’re writing for. With a clear reader profile, you’ll be able to tailor your copy to target this ideal reader, including what keywords to target and the clear calls to action to create.

Demographics

What’s your reader’s age, sex, location and gender?

Demographics is an important first step in your reader profile. This will help inform the tone of voice, keywords and approach you take to your style of copywriting. Knowing your demographics are important as these are key points to target.

Psychographics

What are your reader’s beliefs, interests and motivations?

Copywriting almost always appeals to emotions in some way. Knowing what it is that drives or motivates your reader is particularly important. Are they driven by a need for money, freedom, safety, security or something else?

Consistency

Creating a profile that meshes together consistently.

Writing a reader profile requires a consistent personality of your ideal reader. Don’t try and be all things to all people, but rather create this ideal reader profile as a template of someone you’d like to read your content. You can create this fictional person and fill in the gaps on their hobbies, eating habits, personality and behavior based on intuition and experience.

Headlines

In today’s world, our attention is more limited than ever, and a headline that doesn’t grab my interest doesn’t get a click. According to legendary copywriter David Ogilvy,   “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

One of my favorite copywriters that ever lived was Eugene Schwartz who has since passed away. One of his biggest accomplishments was writing “Breakthrough Advertising” a legendary book that is now out of print but can be found used (and usually beat up) on eBay for as much as $1000.

Here are some amazing insights from Eugene’s book on writing powerful headlines

1. Measure the size of the claim
2. Measure the speed of the claim
3. Compare the claim to its (unnamed) rival
4. Sensitize with feel, smell, touch, see or hear it. (“Tastes like you just picked it!”)
5. Remove limitations from the claim
6. State the claim as a question (e.g. Who else wants whiter wash – with no hard work?”)
7. Insert authority into the claim
8. Before-and-after the claim
9. Stress the newness of the claim
10. Stress the exclusivity of the claim
11. Turn the claim into a challenge for the reader
12. Disrupt the reader by contradicting the way they think it should work
13. Connect the need and the claim in the headline
14. Give a name to the the problem or need
15. Warn about possible problems if they don’t use the product
16. Show how easy the claim is
17. Accuse the claim of being too good (e.g. “Is it immoral to make money this easily?”)
18. Turn the claim into a question and answer

Here are 3 more gold nuggets when considering the perfect headline

Scarcity

Scarcity simple means that the offer will not be around forever. It tells the reader that if they want the deal, they need to make a decision quickly or else it may not be there soon. “Act now while supplies last”, “Sale ends this Tuesday at Midnight”, “Only 6 left”

Express Value

Are you valuing your readers’ time by offering something valuable in return? Value doesn’t have to be money, it can be a life-hack, productivity tip, entertaining article or humorous joke.

The type of value you provide has to be relevant to your target audience, which is why knowing who you’re writing for is so important. For someone to invest their limited attention to reading something you write, you need to provide something valuable in return. The more value you create, the better your relationship with this person.

Be Specific:

In the ultra-competitive world of SEO, the more specific you are at targeting customers the better. For example, if you’re a car shop writing copy about how to change a tire, your copy will be lost in a sea of other better ranked articles about this topic on Google.

If you’re copywriting a how-to guide on changing a tire for a specific make of car under certain types of weather conditions including the tools you’re using, you’ll probably get more niche but higher quality readers who are more interested in what you’re saying.   This attention to detail is important as well for long tail keywords, which target more specific audiences in Google’s search engine.

Education Based Copywriting:

In the bestselling book The Ultimate Sales Machine author Chet Holmes explains that only 3% of any given audience is interested in your specific product or service at any given time. If you own a website that sells something online, this means that writing copy about that offering in order to sell is only going to be effective on 3% of your audience. Rather than creating copy that sells your offering non-stop, a more effective approach is offering your readers some education of value to them and builds credibility.

This is an education based copywriting approach that is popular throughout the internet. The goal of education based copywriting is to offer value to your reader. This could be in the form of helpful tips and tricks, time saving measures or money saving measures. If the information is useful, it’ll position your website as an expert in the mind of the buyer relative to competitors.

Weaving the information in a way that leads your consumers into trusting you and the information you bring to the table is a great copywriting style. Education based copywriting is particularly popular among e-commerce businesses. These businesses are focused on educating their customer base about problems they identify, but are not aware of. By educating readers, you improve their ability to make good decisions.

Finding Your Own Style:

One of the beautiful things about copywriting is that there’s the ability to create your own style. While exploring styles would require a blog post in itself, the educational type of copywriting is a widespread and popular choice today.

However, I encourage everyone who reads this to find your own method of writing copy. No one knows your readers or customers better than you, meaning you should write in a style you feel is suitable to your audience. CopyBlogger has 11 Tips to finding a writing voice your audience will take seriously.

Wrap Up

I truly believe that writing with an understanding of what you want to achieve and who you are writing for will aid the craft and delivery of your message. While copywriting is a creative process, it’s good to start with the end in mind and deliver a powerful message.

We’ve seen just how important a good headline is in copywriting. In order to stand out, you need to convey the urgency that your content is worth reading, to emphasize that it’s valuable to the reader, and that it’s specific to who your targeting. I’d advise against trying to create overly general content that is saturated by competitors, but rather carve out your own topics.

It’s important to write with an audience in mind. On the other hand, it’s crucial not to lose the creative flair that brings life and energy to your writing. In today’s online copywriting, it’s easy to judge the success or areas of improvement in your writing through analytics and also people’s own opinions.

A website without metrics is like a car without mirrors. Without them, your view is severely limited. In this post, we’ll look at Google Analytics and its ability to serve relevant, actionable data to make improvements to your website.

If you have a website, you need to know how to use metrics to measure what is most important to you. Google Analytics is the most widely used and popular analytics service on the internet. The power in Google Analytics lies in its analyses of all your website’s traffic from visitors.

The data and metrics in Google Analytics can be overwhelming, so I’ve put together a post that covers the 5 biggest metrics to pay attention to with Google Analytics.

Metric 1: Google Analytics Acquisition Overview:

Acquisition overview helps you understand how people find your website. Driving traffic to your website is often expensive and time consuming. We can cultivate fantastic social followings, brilliant email lists and spend huge money on advertising, but without acquisition analytics, we’re blind to what’s working and what isn’t.

Using acquisition overview, you can see what channels are generating the highest quality traffic for your site. This will give you an insight into where to invest more time and money and where to divest.

Within the Acquisition overview, you can take a look at the Top Channels, which will show you exactly what channels are driving the best traffic to your site. These channels include:

Direct – Traffic that has come to your site directly from URLs typed into the address bar, a direct link or clicking on a bookmark to your site.

Organic Search – These are organic traffic coming from search engines.

Paid Search – Paid search traffic comes from Pay Per Click sources that come from Paid Media channels across the internet.

Display – Users that arrive from branded banner ads on other websites across the web.

Referral Traffic – Any site visitor that is referred to your site by someone else fits into the category of referral traffic.

Social – Users who come to your site via social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or Twitter are all categorized under the social category.

Email – Links that are clicked on through your email list generate this metric.

In addition to these, you can also add your own custom marketing channels if existing ones are not covered in the default options. Simply go to Admin, View, Channel Settings, Channel Grouping and then click Define a new channel. This gives you the ability to add your own!

Why is Acquisition Overview Important?

This metric is important as it separates perception from reality. While you may think you’re executing exceptional marketing campaigns that drive traffic to your site, the data might tell a different story. Through acquisition, you get a crystal-clear overview of what’s working and what’s not.

Taking these figures into account, you can decide what you want to invest more marketing resources in and what to take out. However simply driving traffic to your site only tells one side of the story, the other side is keeping your visitors engaged enough that they want to hang around. This is the metric we’ll focus on next, known as bounce rate.

Metric 2: Bounce Rate:

As defined by Google, a bounce is a single-page session on your site. If people are accessing your site and immediately leaving it, you’ll have a high bounce rate. Even if you’ve generated great traffic from multiple sources, the traffic is useless if the users don’t stay on your site.

You want visitors to interact with your site as much as possible. A high bounce rate may be an indicator that you need to make changes to improve your site. Bounce rates differ depending on the website and its content, however there are some general figures to keep in mind. According to Google Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik:

“As a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying.“

Why is this important?

Unfortunately, while Google indicates there is a high bounce rate, it doesn’t say why exactly there is one. There are a few elements of your site that you need to examine in order to determine if these are contributing to high bounce. Good indicators include:

Relevant Ads: If ads driving traffic to your site are causing people to arrive and then leave immediately, check that these ads are truly accurate and relevant. If you mislead people in your marketing and they end up clicking through to irrelevant content, just remember you’re wasting their time and your money.

Mobile Optimization: Is your website mobile friendly? If not, you may be repelling the ever-growing number of mobile users away from your site out of sheer annoyance at the poor user experience.

Poor Keyword Choice: Organic searchers that discover your site through their own search engines expect that the content of a site matches what they’re searching. Irrelevant website content will harm your bounce rate.

Metric 3: Exit Rate

Exit rate is the percentage of people who left your site a certain page. Exitors may have viewed more than one page in a session. That means they may not have landed on that page, but simply found their way to it through site navigation.

This is subtly different from bounce rates, which simply measure a single page session. While it may be “normal” for people to exit on certain pages (after buying a product), other exits during the sales funnel can be worrying.

Why are Exit Rates Important?

For e-commerce sites, identifying at what stage your visitors are leaving your sales funnel is vital. Through exit rates, you’ll see which pages are having an impact on your visitors leaving, what content is causing them to leave or if there’s any particular channel causing them to leave. Knowing where your visitors are dropping off from the site as they progress is vital.

Metric 4: New vs Returning Visitors:

One of the best audience demographics in Google Analytics is new vs. returning visitors. A new visitor is one who’s visiting your site from a new device completely for the first time.

A returning visitor has visited your site before and has returned. Google Analytics will give you insights into how much of your traffic is fresh and how much is returning. This will include the behavior of each cohort, including bounce rates and average time per session.

Why is this useful?

If you’re running an e-commerce site, knowing who you’re converting most often is extremely valuable. You can possibly incentivize new, price sensitive customers to purchase through pop-up deals or discounts. Knowing whether you’re more successful attracting or retaining visitors will greatly inform your marketing decisions.

For example, do you have a high bounce rate on returning visitors? If so, you may have a great ability to attract new visitors through advertising or keywords, but a poor ability to keep them interested to return. This may cause you to invest more in a compelling, interesting content strategy.

Metric: 5: Goals:

Goals are one of the most important metrics Google Analytics has to offer. They’re extremely tailored to seeing if your visitors convert into taking a desired action. When you set a goal, you tell Google that when a certain criterion is met, this is considered a goal. For an e-commerce site, there are numerous templates Google has for goals:

Revenue goals – These include placing an order and checkout completion.

Acquisition – This is whenever a user creates an account.

Inquiry goals – This is when a view more, views a contact us page, sees deals or reads reviews.

Engagement goals – This is when a user compares information (features, products or options), shares your content on social, signs up to a newsletter or saves products to a shopping cart.

Custom – This is where you can create your own custom goal template not included in the above templates.

Once this is decided, you can describe exactly what your goal will look like. You can select a URL destination that, once reached, will trigger your goal to be a success. This could be a thank-you page after a product has been purchased, or when something has been downloaded.

Why are Goals Important?

Whether you’re getting sign-ups to your email list, selling products / services or providing a free e-book, your goals are vital to measuring your success.

Wrap Up:

Google Analytics provides powerful data to aid your decision-making. By using these above five metrics, you can gain greater insights into your audience sources, their behavior and their demographics.

It’s important to note that while Google Analytics will give you the information, you must decide the meaning from the data. Understanding and interpreting metrics is the first step in the road to mastering Google Analytics.

There are also considerations around the size of the data pool and the time frame. A smaller data pool will give you less accurate information, while historical data that doesn’t take into account key changes you made to your site will muddy the clarity around the data.

When in doubt, return to this guide and follow the practices that will help you on your way to understanding the biggest metrics in Google Analytics.

What are some ways you’ve used Google Analytics to improve your website and sales funnel? Let me know in the comments! For more help taking your digital marketing to the next level visit our blog.