With so many web pages and only so many hours in the day; potential customers will spend only seconds looking at your site before moving on – so how can you make those seconds count?

Your readers will be looking for web copy which is easy to scan, signposting key messages quickly and clearly. We’ve frequently discussed the importance of using clear and concise language on this blog and it comes into play again here. Potential customers need to be able to understand what you are saying or selling instantly; hence jargon-free, simple, effective prose is required.

For each page of web copy, you should be looking to front-load your content by putting your key message at the top of the copy, rather than reserving it for the conclusion; as is more common across traditional media.  This enables readers to decide instantly if they are on the right page or not and captures their attention. Sub-headings can have a similar effect by clearly signposting the site’s content and allowing users to find their target quicker and easier.

Once you have your content, there are several formatting steps you can take to achieve maximum impact, such as emboldening key messages. This instantly draws the eye of the reader to what you want to say. This will naturally happen on links, so make sure that your linking text says something you want to be read, not just ‘click here’.

By applying these simple steps you can be sure you’re web copy is more likely to turn a roving eye into a ready customer.

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Including keywords in your web copy can be a delicate balancing act: too few and you’re invisible to search engines, too many and you get thrown straight in the spam bin. Add to this the fact that with any given website there are hundreds of keyword possibilities, and it’s no wonder you want to reach for the headache tablets!

Start with the message you want your web copy to convey.  Which words and phrases immediately spring to mind? Remember to keep your audience in mind: how would they describe your products and services?

Once you have your list, you need to check which keywords people are looking for. Google has a fantastic tool, free to use, which gives up-to-date search statistics. Often small changes in keywords can make a huge difference – ‘child’ vs ‘children’, for example. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring localities: many people run localised searches, e.g. “children’s nursery Ipswich”, and it’s the websites that have included local place names in their copy that are going to be displayed in these search results.

If you have website analytics, these will also help you identify which keywords are working for you. Although they won’t help you develop new ones, knowing what has worked previously can help you move forward and build on your existing success.

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If you’re looking to get your site picked up by the major search engines, then your copy needs to help attract their attention. The process of creating your content with the search engines in mind is called SEO copywriting.

The easiest place to start is with the title of your page or article. Search engines will initially look here, as this is the quickest and easiest way to judge content. Therefore, you need to know your target keywords and ensure these are incorporated.

As with most elements of web copy, conciseness is a virtue. The perfect title is 72 characters or less as this length enables search engines to display its entirety in their results, encouraging potential clients to click through.

Search engines are also very friendly towards unique content which is frequently updated. This means you shouldn’t duplicate your SEO copywriting across pages and create a regular update scheme for your site, such as a blog. Size also matters. Search engines are more likely to find individual pages if the copy is a substantial length – try to ensure all your pages have at least 200 words of text.

Throughout your content, it helps to have your keyword repeated a limited number of times. However, search engines also look at the number of times you’ve used your keywords in your SEO copywriting. While keyword density is a hotly debated topic, you should steer clear of excessive repetition. The search engines are wise to it, and it’s off-putting for readers too.

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Great websites are those which reflect the personalities of the people and business they represent. They don’t rely solely on facts and figures to get their point across, but dabble in emotion and anecdote. Such web content works because it creates a story for your business, reaching out to customers on a very human level and catching their interest.

Your web content needs to be compelling and memorable, and storyboarding your website can help you achieve this. We all remember the fairy tales we were told as children, but very few of us could re-sit a Science GCSE today – the facts have long since slipped away from our memories.

So how can storytelling work on your website? Anecdotes, either from yourself or as a testimonial, can provide a great structure for contextualising your content, creating an engaging story which will remain with your customer long after they log off.

Content that captures should reach clients on an emotional level, evoking a strong response through the images it creates in their minds and the concepts it expresses. Literary techniques such as analogy and metaphor are crucial here to help create a visceral content which doesn’t require pictures for the customer to see what you’re talking about.

An understanding of creative writing can be helpful here, but the real crunch test is when you read it back. How do you react? What images do the content conjure in your mind’s eye? Is this the kind of image you want to be projecting to your client? If the answer to the final question is Yes, then you’ve nailed your web content.



Talk to Write My Site if you would like to explore business blogging, article marketing or web content. All work is covered by our Quality Guarantee to ensure you’re 100% satisfied with your content.

For optimum website content, you need to achieve a very fine balance between copy and images. This is especially important as web content must be as concise as possible and the temptation to replace words with images can be remarkably strong.

Before giving in to this, you need to consider the drawbacks of losing web copy. You can’t have ‘key pictures’ as you would key words. Images are not picked up by search engines in the same way (although you can add an ‘alt’ tag to tell the search engines what the image is about). This instantly cuts down on your visibility to vital marketing outlets.

If you are worried that your site will appear text-heavy then keep paragraphs short, with plenty of white space in-between. This makes for more memorable writing, allowing your key messages to jump out at the reader.

When selecting images make sure they have an obvious relevance and are not open to misinterpretation. The relationship between words and images is crucial and should amplify meaning rather than confuse it. An excellent but apocryphal example of how not to choose an image comes from a baby food company, said to have put a picture of a baby and no text on their tins, only to see their sales drop in Africa as people assumed they were selling canned babies.

However, when used correctly images can add visual interest to your web content, emphasising key messages of the copy to create a more memorable experience for potential clients.

What do you want your website content to do for your business? You probably want to attract the attention of search engines, to raise your online profile and to gain potential clients’ confidence in your business. One way you can help achieve all of these goals is to include a ‘News’ section on your website.

The most efficient news sections are designed to be quickly updatable and usually keep news items to 250 or so words, an ideal length for attracting Internet readers. This can always link to a longer article on your company blog if you feel there is more to say. However, if you do create longer versions, ensure they have a purpose. As with all web content, news items and associated articles should be kept clear and concise. Use exactly as many words as you need - not a single letter more. A regular schedule of fresh content means your site will be crawled more often by the search engines.

A frequently updated website also sends a strong signal to potential customers that you are an active and dynamic company. It gives them an insight into your aims, achievements and work in the current market that product descriptions and static pages can’t achieve. To this end, consider a variety of news posts on a variety of topics. Types of posts may include articles on product and company news (upgrades, promotions, recent press coverage); as well as wider industry news.

Online news sections can work really well in tandem with business blogs: the former can demonstrate your organisation’s leadership in its industry, whereas the latter offers a more informal platform for potential customers to interact.

The internet has now become one of the first ports of call for customers looking to learn more about a business. Therefore, as with any good marketing material, your website copy should make a strong first impression and be aimed at driving enquiries and sales.

As Walt Disney once said, “always leave them wanting more”. Your website copy should be concise and provide enough information to hook your audience. Many companies make the mistake of attempting to answer every possible question on their pages, which can lead to text-heavy clunky sites.

So you’ve got to be focused. Once you have your website structure, make a list of key points for each page. The list should only be 3 or 4 items long. Stick to this list and ensure that pages don’t openly duplicate text across the site. You’ll also need to bear in mind your keywords and ensure these are scattered throughout with the necessary frequency to attract search engines.

As with your blog content, you will need to decide on your tone. This will be largely dictated by your corporate identity and demographic.

Regardless of your demographic, you should be aiming to galvanize them into finding out more. Calls to action are a frequent, and crucial, part of any website design. Make it very clear what you want the user to do: if you’re an ecommerce retailer you’ll need lots of prominent ‘Buy Now’ buttons. If you sell professional services and you want the website to act as a lead generator, you’ll need to make every effort to capture your visitors’ ID, via contact forms, newsletter sign-up boxes, or free information products in exchange for contact details. The psychology of many web users is to ‘look and not touch’. Converting your traffic to sales has to be the primary aim of your web content, so make sure you give you visitors clear incentives to leave their contact details with you.

Content has to be at the centre of a successful link building strategy. That’s the verdict from Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft which aims to rival Google. The search engine’s webmaster blog clearly states:

“We’ve said it before, and you’ll hear it said again: content is king. Providing high-quality content on your pages is the single most important thing you can do to attract inbound links.

“If your content is unique and useful to people, your site will naturally attract visitors and, as a result, automatically get good links to your site. By focusing on great content, over time, your site will naturally acquire those coveted inbound links.”

Here are Bing’s top tips for stellar web content:

•  Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content

•  Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content

•  Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant

•  Publish expert articles to online article directories

•  Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)

•  Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)

•  Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications

•  Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site

•  Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums

•  Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom

How can you successfully communicate your brand’s message to your website’s visitors? Here are 8 ways:

1)    Your web writing needs to spell out why people should buy from you and not your competitors: we live in a world of similar businesses with similar prices targeting similar customers. Tell people why they should bother to buy from you.

2)    Highlight all the customer benefits of what’s on offer as well as a clear explanation of the product or service. Don’t go overboard on technicalities: you only need to tell people enough to get them interested and motivate them to take action; you don’t need to educate them about every single detail straightaway.

3)    Weave your keywords into the text (and especially into your headings) to improve your chances of a good search engine ranking.

4)    Structure your text so the main points are put across even to people who initially scan your website copy, rather than read it in detail. Use headings and formatting with this in mind.

5)    Write to your customers, not just about the product or service.

6)    Put your message forward in clear, concise English – no jargon or corporate-speak.

7)    Drop ‘teasers’, ‘tasters’ and ‘soundbites’ into your web writing to stir up the desire in your visitors to know more about what you can do for them.

8)    Make sure your copywriting is crafted in keeping with the graphic design and layout of your website.

1)    It’s gotta be regular! If you want your website to appear anywhere in Google, you MUST update it with fresh SEO content on a regular basis. At a minimum, you need to be adding content to your site once a week – if you can do it more often, that’s even better. The operative word here is “adding”. There’s a mistaken belief in some circles that you should re-write your existing pages on a regular basis, when in fact it’s adding new content that will really boost your chances in the search engines. Try to ensure that the majority of your SEO content is unique. It’s OK to post an occasional piece of content from another site but keep in mind that Google is looking for sites with something original to say.

2)    Write a blog. A lot of websites are “static”, i.e. basic brochure-style sites with content that don’t really need embellishing or updating. Installing a blog is therefore a neat solution to the problem of needing to add regular content. The blog can have its own section on the site (www.sitename.co.uk/blog) and any number of posts can be added without disrupting the overall usability of the website. If you use a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress for your blog, you’ll find it’s as easy to use as Microsoft Word. Lace your blog articles with your keywords and link those keywords to other pages of your site for extra SEO brownie points.

3)    Say something useful. A business blog is only as good as the topics it writes about. After all, you want the readers to engage with your carefully crafted SEO content and subsequently take an interest in your products and services. What do your customers find interesting and useful? The reason our own SEO content focuses on blogging is because we’re a team of article writers and blog writers and we want to attract readers who share our interests. Don’t make the mistake of using your business blog as your personal diary. Your blog needs a consistent theme that’s relevant to the needs and interests of its readership.