Copywriting for the Web
A web design that looks nice does just that – it looks nice. You don’t want to scare off potential customers with a site that looks outdated or unreliable, but after visitors look at your site, chances are you’d like them to do something more. Websites are some of the greatest marketing tools created, but just having something out on the Internet isn’t enough. First, you need your potential customers to find it. And second, once they get there, you need to give them a reason to take action. One thing you can do to accomplish both of these goals is to get good, informative copy on your website.
How Do You Do This?
Copywriting for the web is different than writing for print, but a few general guides can take you a long way. Effectively written web copy is copy that’s carefully crafted to appeal to both potential customers and to search engines. Unlike writing a press release or an article for print, you must keep these two very different audiences in mind.
Your Audience: Search Engines
Search engines are robots who read your site by scanning it for key words. If the search engines don’t read key words that customers are searching, then fewer potential customers will get the chance to read your site.
Your Audience: Potential Customers
However, while the search engines need to read and rank your site for customers to find, you won’t see results if your copy is difficult and unnatural for customers to read. Reading on a computer screen is a different experience than reading in print. With so much information on the Internet, visitors quickly scan website pages for what they’re looking for, which means your content needs to clearly state what you want them to see.
Reading on the Web
Keep these statistics* in mind when you start your web copywriting:
- People read 25% slower on a computer screen than on paper
- Instead of reading word for word, 79% of users scan a web page
- Web copy should have 50% of the word count the same copy would have on paper
Effective web copywriting requires finding a balance between including key words for the search engines and creating informative, concise copy for your potential customers. When done correctly, including your target key words in your site copy will benefit both the search engines and your visitors’ experiences.
*Statistics from http://www.sun.com/980713/webwriting/
