Your website copy is the main text of your website that communicates to your visitors about your brand and the products or services you offer.
If the ultimate goal of your website is to convert your digital visitors into paying customers, one of the best ways to do better is by improving your website copy. To help you get started, we’ve created this short list of 10 ways to improve your website copy.
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10 Ways to Improve Your Website Copy
Understand Your Target Audience & Customer Personas
Understanding your target audience is a critical component of any effective marketing strategy. The most effective digital marketers work to define and understand their target audiences by creating customer personas, sometimes called buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a fictional profile of your ideal customer. It includes their demographic information, personality metrics, preferred brands and communication channels, motivations, goals, frustrations, decision-making tendencies, and state of mind.
By creating customer personas, advertisers can start to identify the best ways to write website copy that resonates with their target audience.
Develop And Understand Your Brand Values
Your brand values are the beliefs and principles that guide your brand in the world. Communicating your brand values through your website copy can help frame your business in a positive light, but lots of brands either fail to define their values whatsoever or neglect to communicate those values to their customers.
Caption: Drift wanted to convince its customers that conversational marketing was the most powerful way to drive on-page conversions. To do so, Drift stopped using lead forms and started relying on its own conversational marketing platform to drive conversions. Drift turned this initiative into a strong brand value built around integrity and showing belief in the power of their product.
Using your website copy to express your brand values and show your potential customers what you believe in can be a powerful way of strengthening your brand identity and building trust in your products and services.
Test Long-form And Short-form Website Copy
Marketers should use both long-form and short-form website copy when it makes sense to do so. Long-form copy usually performs better on high-intent pages with high-value conversion targets where marketers can drive conversions by overcoming objections. Short-form website copy works better on pages with simpler conversion goals where marketers get the best results by reducing friction in the conversion process.
Use Testimonials And Social Proof
If you’re having trouble connecting with your target audience, implementing social proof marketing on your website can help you build trust and convince potential customers that doing business with you is a great idea.
Caption: We publish case studies to educate our potential customers on the success stories we’ve achieved in the past, encouraging them to work with us in the future.
Social proof marketing includes any feature on your website that highlights your relationships with other players in your industry. Industry award badges, partner logos, customer success stories, and testimonials are all examples of effective social proof marketing.
Focus On The Benefits Of Your Product Or Service
Your website copy should focus on the benefits of the product or service that you provide. At the end of the day, customers don’t care too much about product features or how clever your engineering team is – they care about the benefits they’re going to get when they purchase your product.
Write A Powerful UVP (Unique Value Proposition) or Several
Your website copy should include unique value propositions that communicate to visitors the value of purchasing your product or service. A powerful UVP identifies a customer pain point, then connects that pain point with a solution offered by your product or service.
According to the Harvard Business school, there are 3 questions that must be answered to create a strong value proposition:
- Which customers will I serve?
- What customer needs will I meet with my product or service?
- What relative price is appropriate for my product? Should I be at parity, more expensive, or less expensive than competitors?
Source: Harvard Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness
Write Better CTAs
If you’re having trouble converting visitors on high-intent pages of your website, you may be able to improve results by refining your calls to action.
An effective CTA uses imperative language, speaks directly to the visitor, offers something of value, creates urgency, addresses objections, and ultimately encourages them to sign up for a free trial or submit their email address to your opt-in campaign.
Focus On User Intent & Experience
Visitors on every page of your website have an intention. They’re either looking for information, comparing your products and services, searching for information about your brand or company, or something else. They may even be looking for a job application.
As a digital marketer, your job is to understand what users want on every page of your website and give it to them using website copy. If your visitor is reading a blog post, they’re most likely searching for information – so be concise and give the answer.
Make Your Copy Web-friendly
Most of your visitors won’t read every word of your website copy – they’ll skim it for keywords and try to pick out the most important information that’s relevant to their needs. As a web copywriter, you can design pages that are web-friendly, meaning that they’re easier to browse or skim for relevant content.
Try the following tips for making your website copy web-friendly:
- Optimize for search engines and human users by including the target keyword in relevant headings and subheadings where appropriate
- Organize your pages in a visual hierarchy
- Use bullet points, headings, paragraphs, and numbered lists to break up the text and make it easier to skim
Caption: As part of our content marketing strategy for Directive Institute, we publish web-friendly content with numbered lists and a clear visual hierarchy. This makes our content easier to read and helps our readers get the most value from every blog post we publish.
Make Your Website Copy Easier to Read
A final way to improve your website copy is by making it easier to read. Simplicity is king. Write directly to your audience and use short words with concise sentences. Use the active voice and keep your writing in the present tense. Avoid excessive punctuation or acronyms.
Summary
Improving your website copy can help you form a stronger connection with customers, resulting in increased conversions and greater revenue generation through your website.
To learn more about how you can use persuasive writing to power your online marketing and advertising campaigns, check out our Directive Institute lesson on How to Create Ad Copy.
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CEO Garrett Mehrguth
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