What makes good (website) copywriting?

Attention is in short supply today. Whether you want to sell a product, service or simply want peoples’ attention, compelling website copywriting is essential. Here’s how you persuade your audience to continue reading and take action.

Photo by Mark König via Unsplash

Clarity and Conciseness

Clarity and Conciseness are the number one commandment of any copy, websites are no exception. Easy to understand writing, free of jargon, helps your audience to quickly understand what your content is about. This is further underlined by using as few words as possible. Asking yourself about the purpose of each sentence is a powerful way to avoid superfluous words.

Know your audience

Visitors of your site are there for a reason. What is that reason? Tailor your website to the needs, preferences, and pain points of your audience. This also means talking to your audience in a tone and voice that resonates with them, whether it’s professional, casual, friendly , or authoritative. It helps to imagine how you’d talk to that audience face to face or in a presentation.

Compelling headlines

“Unlock the Secret to Effortless Weight Loss”, “Weight loss is not effortless, or is it?” may be the website visitor’s thought in response to this controversial title. If you are struggling with weight, like many of us are, I’d probably have your attention now, and you are likely going to continue reading with a critical eye. While only one variation, a rule of thumb is, you have seconds, if not split seconds, to hook your audience. What follows is a lead paragraph summarising the content and responding to your reader’s intent.

SEO Optimisation

You are not only writing for humans, but also for search engines. Integrating keywords relevant to your business will help Google and Bing rank your website. Naturally, as a copywriter I will ensure that the word “copywriter” and “copywriting” will appear on my website. Further boost your site’s visibility and increase click-through rates from search engine results pages (SERPs) by writing an accurate summary of your site, called a meta description. Depending on the search query, a search engine like Google may generate a snippet, based on the meta description, the site’s content or search query.

CTA - Call to Action

It doesn’t matter if you are selling something or informing people, you want your site’s visitor to take action. The message should be straightforward, visible and underlined by a sense of urgency. The visitor’s thinking should follow this pattern “by clicking here, I am one step closer to solving my problem” and “by doing it now I will receive rewarded”.

Example: Sign up now for a 50% discount!

Using the tools website hosting platforms like Elementor provide, can visually highlight your CTA.

Example of a meta description

Readability

To ensure your copy is easy to read, use short paragraphs and sentences, and avoid complex words. Break up text with subheadings and bullet points to make it more digestible. Also, consider using a readable font that is neither too small, nor too big, and use adequate spacing. Of course, using a visual hierarchy is critical for your reader to spot the most important information at a glance. Consider thinking of it this way, if your reader were not to read your content beginning to end, what do you want them to walk away with.

Trustworthiness

Trustworthiness online has two components: social proof and transparency. Before buying a product or visiting a place, you likely want a real person’s opinion of their experience, not the official sales pitch. To convince your website’s visitor to stay, add testimonials, reviews, case studies or a portfolio.

Example:

John Doe, CEO of XYZ Company, says, 'This product changed my life!

Also, being transparent about products, services and policies, build rapport with your site’s visitors in the short- and long run.

Engagement

Give your audience an opportunity to engage with your content by adding social sharing buttons, quizzes, polls or a comment section where appropriate. But to truly connect with your audience, use a conversational tone, it can be colloquial or professional, or something in between. Just imagine how you would talk to your target audience in a face-to-face conversation

Consistency

“Is your brand addressing the needs of the masses or a particular segment?”, “What’s the average age of my taget audience?”, “Is my brand fun, formal or informative, or a bit of everything?”. These are some of the questions you can use to strike the right tone with the right voice, but remain consistent throughout all your pages. And the same goes for your core message. Let’s say you have a food catering business, the core message could be: We make delicious food, and cater to weddings, parties and any other imaginable social occasion. Get in touch. Even if you have a blog with recipes, the core message, should guide your content. Consistency in voice, tone, and message helps build a strong brand identity.

Putting it all together. Design the content on your website with your visitor (yourself) in mind. What would you be looking for, if you were to visit someone’s website offering what you are?

If you are nervous about SEO, which you may be unfamiliar with, don’t be. Again, you can use keyword tools. But simply typing into google the search terms you’d be looking for, can give you important clues about what people are searching for. And a clue to, what questions you should answer in your content.

If you want to know more or need help creating compelling content for your own website:

What is SEO copywriting and what makes the difference?

Learn how to use the best SEO copywriting strategies to optimise your website content for search engines and ensure it's not only high quality but also findable. From keyword research to meta tag optimisation, discover what it takes to get your content to the top of search results.

Photo by Dominico Loia via Unsplash

Understand your target audience and keywords

To excel at SEO copywriting, you first need to understand your target audience and the keywords they use. Start with thorough keyword research using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify the terms your prospective readers are searching for. Get to the bottom of user intent - what are they hoping to find, learn or achieve with their searches? Tailor your content to these specific needs. Long-tail keywords can be particularly effective as they are less competitive and more targeted, helping you to target a highly relevant audience. By tailoring your content to the search behaviour and intentions of your target audience, you will create more meaningful and discoverable material.

Create high quality, engaging content

Now that you've found suitable keywords, you're ready to create high-calibre content. Creating high-quality, engaging content is at the heart of effective SEO copywriting. Your content should offer real value, answer your target audience's questions and solve their problems. To keep readers engaged, you should focus on readability: Use short paragraphs, bullet points, subheadings and relevant images to break up the text and make it easier to digest. Don't forget the impact of a powerful headline - a meaningful title that includes your most important keyword can significantly increase click-through rates. By providing valuable, well-structured and visually appealing content, you not only satisfy your audience, but also improve your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

Structure with header tags

But it's not just about finding the right keywords, it's also about placing them correctly. For example, keywords that best describe your topic should appear in headings or in jargon in title tags. Just like your readership or website visitors, search engines are also interested in a logical organisation of your content. The best way to do this is to use so-called header tags, abbreviated to H1, H2, H3 etc. Each of these tags corresponds to a higher or lower priority. H1 corresponds to the highest priority, H2 to the second highest and so on. If you were writing about apples, "What is an apple?" would be a suitable heading for H1, "Where do apples grow" would be well suited for H2 and "How is apple juice made" would be more specific and better suited for H3.

Use internal and external links

Integrating internal and external links into your content is essential for search engine optimisation. Internal links that direct readers to other relevant pages within your website help to engage visitors and improve the crawlability of your website, making it easier for search engines to index your content. External links to reputable sources, on the other hand, provide additional value and context to your readers, which can increase the credibility of your content. By strategically using a mix of internal and external links, you can create more informative and meaningful content that benefits both users and search engines.

Optimise for mobile devices and loading speed

Make sure your website looks great on mobile devices and loads quickly, as many users scroll through your website on their mobile devices. A responsive design ensures that your site works well on all devices and that the user experience is stellar. Also make sure your site loads lightning fast by optimising images, using browser caching and minimising JavaScript (if you're not using a website builder like Squarespace or Wix). A fast loading time is not only important for your visitors, but also a decisive factor for your search engine ranking. With a mobile-friendly and fast website, you will score points with your users and Google alike.

The bottom line

By applying these SEO copywriting strategies, you can ensure that your content hits the mark and is findable by search engines. Get started today and watch your visibility and traffic to your website improve!

Fancy more tips and tricks on SEO copywriting? Take a look at my website. You can also book a free consultation with me.

5 benefits of outsourcing your translation to a professional translator

Expanding your business into new markets requires accurate translations. Five benefits that will make you seriously consider hiring a professional translator.

You save invaluable time  

You surely have heard the cliché saying “time is money”, but few people take this to heart, unjustly so. Imagine coding an encrypted screen recorder that you plan to commercialise in the coming months. You are working at capacity, chugging Red Bull after Red Bull, putting in 20-hour-work days, with no guarantee your product will find a buyer or regular subscriber. To add insult to injury you haven’t factored in that Ongota is likely not the language spoken by your main buyer group that sits in Germany or the United States. Since you don’t want to spend the extra buck, you decide to take matters into your own hands and invest another 

60 hours in cobbling together a mediocrely translated website in English, likely costing you foregone revenue and time better spent on putting your product to the acid test. Instead you could hire a translator who will do the job in a fraction of the time, freeing up time better spent on the product itself. 

More money in the bank

But wait, translators are expensive, no?!! Without a doubt, a quality translation is an investment, and a good translation will surely cost you. It is not uncommon for translators to charge you per line, page or character, which adds up. That said, many translators are also open to charging a lump sum for a project, especially if they sense you might be a recurring customer or s startup with a tightly calculated budget. Expect your translation tally for a website to, at the very least, be in the high three digits, and that is if you find a good self-respecting translator. Even if you were to pay an amount in the four digits, which may sound like a lot, it is a bargain compared to having a translator on payroll, unless you operate a sweatshop. 

Finally, an outsourced translation may not only save you money, but in fact make you money.  Especially a translator that is experienced in translating marketing collateral and branding material, will not blindly translate your text into the respective destination language. Instead, she will ensure that the text captivates your foreign audience in ways the source language does. A skilled translator can therefore also be thought of as a copywriter, except that she doesn’t create content from scratch, but uses the content provided to speak your customer’s language, whether it’s formal, casual or jovial. 

Quality – This point is key

Don’t get me wrong, there are a whole lot of folk out there that are highly capable of writing in a language other than their own mother tongue. Often enough, they also do a decent job translating material using AI-powered online tools that are pushing the envelope in terms of detecting idioms and other linguistic nuances. Much like a human, these systems– while fast, mostly free and reasonably accurate– are not infallible, not by a long shot, and should only be consulted for private purposes or for situations where the stakes are low. At the very least have your outward-facing communication checked by a skilled translator.

Context is everything

Unlike humans, online translation tools are still struggling to gauge the context, resulting in unintelligible and out-of-context phrases. At best, a native speaker reading your self-translated content will brush off mistakes if he gets the gist of what the author was trying to say or what he came for, at worst, this can lead to a PR disaster, since something innocent in your own language may mean something inappropriate in another language. Save your PR department the damage-control work and pay someone to get it right from the start.

Have someones speak the language that is unique to your field

Specialised fields such as law and engineering are particularly susceptible to translation errors, as these fields often use a set of words not commonly known, sometimes not even to professional translators. It is not uncommon for online translation tools to provide a literal translation or an approximate translation. So if you are planning to introduce your new device and its operating instructions to a foreign market, do yourself a favour, hire a reputable translator that is ideally specialised in that area. While it's not always possible to find a specialised translator for the area you are looking for, a reputable translator will put in the research and is likely able to grasp the context fairly quickly, resulting in a translation that meets your needs. After all, you don’t want your customer service to be overwhelmed with an onslaught of avoidable requests.  

In sum, there is definitely an upfront cost to hiring a translator, but it's an investment that will pay dividends, especially if you are reliant on outward-facing communication. If money is truly tight, at least consider hiring a translator to proofread your translation. That way you can rule out grave mistakes. 

Need help with your English-German translations or someone to edit your work?