Five Ways to Elevate your Website Copy

Creating a website is like creating a home for your business. It is the place anyone from around the world can come and visit your business, see its products, and decide if they want to support it or not. That’s why your web copy needs to be at its best. No matter what you’ve done with your website, there is always potential to elevate your website copy. 

When I say web copy I do not necessarily mean blog posts and other forms of content on your website. Those are great because they help boost your SEO but I am talking about your website as a whole, all the writing that combines together to tell the story of your brand, and mission, and informs anyone who visits your website who you are. This writing creates the bones of your website, piecing it together to create your whole mission statement. 

The hardest part about curating your website is keeping your readers there. It is said that a lot of viewers leave a web page in as little as 10-20 seconds. If this is true you have to be able to say something in ten seconds that can hold a customer long enough to stay on your website.

The same is true for any microsite or storefront you might have on marketplace platforms such as FindLight. At the end of this blog, we specifically discuss how you can optimize your presence on FindLight through your own microsite. 

Website Copy Building Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

Here are five broad things you should consider when writing to elevate your website copy: 

1. Define your Audience 

This might seem kind of obvious, but it is important to know WHO you are writing for before you actually begin writing. Your sales are driven by a need that will be met through the sale, effective copy will do the same.  Always remember though, that if you are hosting an engineering website, you will usually only be catering to that buyer. If you are trying to reach beyond just your narrow niche (say photonics industry), then beginning to look into other industries that potentially might utilize your products is a good place to start. Dipping into their world in order to find more buyers and relating it to your products can be a good stepping stone. 

Try thinking of these questions and see how it shapes your audience:

• Are you selling Services or Products?
• Is your end user savvy in the technology or is he concerned only in the applications of your products without worrying too much about how they work?
• Are they budget concerned or are they looking for the state-of-the-art, no matter the cost?
• Is your customer perhaps concerned with the versatility and abundance of options as he is in the space of prototyping?

Through these, you can create the personas you want to hit through your copy. With tech, you might need to both be targeting the people that help engineer the technology, the people who sell them, and then others who might not have as strong of a background in tech. Understanding who you are selling to will help tech companies understand what jargon to use, how tech-savvy the person will be, and also what type of facts are important to display on different pages. 

2. Be Conversational / Not too Tricky 

It is important in tech to have both the facts but also the human attraction to your products. Find the spaces to create the storyline within the product that can be paired with the facts. These are the places where “you” and “your” come into place. There will not be as much tech jargon and they can be kept to be simple and concise places on your website. 

It is important to have a place where a different side of tech can learn about your company and be able to connect with the idea of your products and the spirit of your company. 

3. Tone 

Before you really dive deep into your website copy, you have to pick the tone of both your audience and yourself. Are you a young tech startup, fast and nimble, or a large multinational with a century worth of history and traditions? Establishing this throughout your website will bridge the connection to your customer and keep up consistency within the copy. 

Tones can range from funny, serious, casual, or enthusiastic. It really depends on the type of company you are, your branding, and how you want your company to relay your message and products. 

4. Organize Facts 

Including specific facts and figures on your website is also helpful because it helps verify that your company is legit. You have to find a certain balance between including too many or too few facts. Find the facts that leave your customers wow-ed and use those on your website copy to continue to pull people in without having to get them on the phone. 

Cross-linking on your website can be helpful through hyperlinks so people can continue learning where the facts came from that they are reading. 

5. Actionable Items 

When you are configuring your website, make sure your web copy has a call to action or a CTA. Make sure there is something to take away from reading your web copy. Do you want them to buy something? Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter so they will see your next product launch? Or maybe you want them to download a presentation or schedule a demo? 

If it is hard to find your action item, ask yourself what you want a visitor to end up with. When you have that answer, work from there and out to create your web copy. This will help make sure there is a unique purpose to everything you write which will help your website flow better. 

Website Copy Creation Photo by Malte Helmhold on Unsplash

Small Places to Start Elevating your Website Copy: 

If you find the above tasks too much to handle, try looking at one of these smaller ways to elevate your website copy. They are easy to incorporate into the daily tasks of your designated writers when trying to improve your copy.

• Cut copy: Ensure your copy is relevant and easy to scan through. Too much copy deters readers.

• Proofread: Typos no more. Ask fellow team members to give your copy a read before hitting publish.

• Make sure you get to the point: The most important information at the top or at the bottom helps readers remember the meat of the copy. They are more likely to read the first and last paragraph than the middle ones.

• Check readability: Humanizing your copy also means making it easy to read. This is an important thing to look into so that way the jargon of excessive punctuation does not make your website unreadable to customers.

• Active voice: Stay active, not passive, we all have heard it before.

• Gripping headlines: This is what gets people to read, take the extra time to make them exciting or have some pull.

• Direct: Being direct makes you look up front and honest. Show people the deal or offer and how they get it in order to find potential customers.

• Scannable: Bullet points and bolding draw people’s eyes to the overarching messages. Do not be afraid to use them.
• Pictures and visuals: They help break up the copy but make sure to keep them relevant. This can help add some spice to keep your pages more engaging and educate the customers that might be more visual.

Two Things that Help Tie your Website Copy Together:

Elevating your website copy through small tasks like tone, active voice, and pictures is great. The two below items will help put the big red bow on your website that helps boost your SEO and best represent your company.

Staying on brand: Incorporating or creating a House style guide will help keep your website copy on brand and translate the same voice through every page no matter who is writing or editing them.

Keyword research: It might be helpful to look into the keywords used on your website. You can begin by leaning into the words or phrases your customers have used when talking about your product or use tools like SEMRush and Moz to find relevant words. Understanding your niche of keywords can help generate more content on your website.

Elevating your content through FindLight storefronts

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, FindLight has a unique place where you can host almost a mini-version of your website as your own storefront on our website. Using the above tactics your storefront can reach more exposure through FindLight’s pre-existing audience while also drawing new customers to your website. If you are not yet on FindLight, you can start as a Vendor for free which allows you to post up to 10 products at no cost. Also, don’t forget to request your storefront to be activated. These storefronts or microsites are a second home to your web copy and a second home for potential sales.

Hosting a storefront on another site with cross-linking will help boost your already existing web site’s SEO and create potential new traffic. This can help with your search-ability on Google and help your company’s keywords we talked about earlier. It’ll act as a portfolio of your products on our site, which will also help with building your company’s credibility and branding. You can request to create your own microsite on FindLight now through our contact us page.

Writing out a whole website can be hard, sometimes it is easier to hire a freelance web designer or copywriter to help build the website based on the style guide you have created for your website. Either way, investing in the virtual home of your company will help you advance in the marketplace and take the lead in sales conversions. Elevating your website copy does not have to happen overnight. You can begin small with one task and go from there!