You may think that developing and maintaining a website for your business is over once you’ve flipped the switch and introduced your new website to the world. Sure, there’ll be the odd product to update but that’s all the effort you need to put in, right? Not so. Developing a website for your business takes time and effort – which doesn’t stop once the web developers are finished.
The truth is, keeping up a good flow of traffic to your website involves keeping your website up to date too. The search engine robots that decide what results to show to each user like to see that a website is fresh, with new content added and interaction happening on the page. That sends the message that your website is working and more importantly, that users are finding something of value there too. The higher the quality and utility of your website, the higher it will be placed in the average search result.
What can improve the quality and utility of your website? Web copywriting.
Copywriting, especially for the web, encompasses a whole range of activities and therefore can be easily misunderstood. Web copywriting for your website could include writing the text for your homepage, all your website pages, writing a blog, writing guest posts on others’ blogs and linking to your website, writing advertisements for use with Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, writing your Christmas e-card, or digital newsletters, email campaigns, articles or research posts. What unites all these various activities, is that web copywriting, like copywriting for print, is designed to increase brand awareness and sales for your business.
How could blogging increase my sales?
It might not seem at first glance like blogging would have anything to do with customers buying your products or services. The relationship isn’t as simple as a straight line from blog post to checkout.
For example:
Imagine you own an online store selling children’s toys, and you write a blog post entitled ‘Top ten toys and games for Christmas’ on the 1st December.
You know that there are plenty of parents searching for Christmas gifts for their children, and that they might be stuck for ideas. Your blog post mentions how difficult it can be to think up new ideas for children’s Christmas presents, then outlines ten gifts that are ideal to buy depending on what your child enjoys. For example, the latest board games for groups of kids, puzzles for the brainboxes, Lego for the hands-on children, etc. After each idea, you might provide a link to each category of toy or game on your website. At the bottom of the blog post, you also feature some products related to the article.
There are two categories of people who might find and read this article. There are those who are already browsing your online store, who see your post and read it for ideas. Then there are those who actually arrive at your site via the blog post. They might have actually searched ‘top gifts for kids’, and clicked on your article in the search results.
For both categories of reader, you are providing informative content, while also giving handy suggestions and links to your products. Either way, you are increasing your chances of a sale, and making your website and brand memorable to those readers – who might just come back next time they are looking for a gift.
How about if you don’t sell products online? Well, it’s not only ecommerce stores that can benefit from producing quality online content.
Let’s take a car mechanic who has a simple website advertising their business. They start a blog and write articles about how to care for your car, simple car problems you can fix at home, how to prepare for a long car journey, and so on. The company are writing using their specialist knowledge and helping people care for their vehicles.
The benefits are threefold. First, their existing customers might appreciate the extra help with looking after their car, and be more likely to become loyal to that mechanic – establishing an ongoing relationship and not tempted to shop around based only on price. Second, simply having the articles online means that they will start appearing in search results related to the key words and phrases in the each article. That a) means you have more pages, therefore more opportunities to be found online, and b) brings in new users who are searching for far more than just ‘car mechanics Auckland’. Lastly, the more time is spent on your website, the higher quality that it will appear to be to the machines who count these things. That will give your website yet another boost up the search engine rankings.
This cycle is repeated every time the mechanic posts a new article. Each new page is a new opportunity to target fresh customers.
What can web copywriting do for my business?
Writing a blog for your website does ALL of the following:
- Provides quality content for your website browsers to read and engage with. You can heighten this by including a comments section below each blog post, sharing each post via your social media accounts, inviting others to write guest posts on your blog etc.
- Helps establish your company’s appearance as a leader/expert in your industry. Your content is informative, helpful, and keeps readers coming back for more advice/tips/research findings.
- Provides huge opportunity to increase website traffic (as we saw in our car mechanic example).
- Increases awareness of your brand and encourages brand loyalty. The more you interact with your customers and provide something for them to engage with, the more likely they will remember you above your competitors.
- Brings in readers who might not have otherwise found your website – therefore increasing your potential sales base.
- Establishes your website as a site generating quality content and real user interaction, thereby boosting your chances of appearing higher in search engine results, and being found by more people.
It’s clear to see now how something simple like blogging on your website can actually boost your business and provide tangible results to your bottom line. Blogging doesn’t have to take much time – you can choose to get staff or the company owner to write relevant content on there, or employ a professional copywriter to contribute regularly to the blog. The upside of a copywriter will be they already understand how to use keywords and write about relevant content designed to appeal to your target market or increase the likelihood of a sale. Plus of course, outsourcing this work leaves your staff free for other tasks. However, if you’ve got one or two willing staff members who have both flair and enthusiasm for writing, you may well want to take advantage of your in-house talent!
If launching a blog is a bit much right now, at least make sure the content on your website is optimised to draw customers to your site and keep them there. Web copywriting for this purpose is especially important on your home page. Investing in a professional copywriter is worthwhile to help sell your brand, your company personality and values, and of course your products and services. A good copywriter will research your industry and use relevant, appropriate keywords to help customers find you online. The benefit of using a web copywriter specifically is that they’ll be familiar with how to upload the content to your website and optimise your web pages too – for example, using meta titles and descriptions, good image titles, and putting the more important keywords in headings and titles. (If you want to learn more, read our post on basic SEO for business websites.)
The benefits of copywriting for your website
I think we can all agree that bad web content is just as irritating as bad web design. Website content with typos, spelling errors – a homepage that doesn’t immediately tell you what the company does/produces, content that’s hard to read, in varying fonts or just waffles on with no important information… we’ve all experienced frustration and annoyance when stumbling across these types of website ourselves. Make sure your own website isn’t committing the same sins!
Investing in good copywriting for your main website pages is just as important as creating other content such as articles and blog posts. To start with, you want customers to find your website, understand what to do when they get there, and make it easy to buy a product or service, get in touch with you, and find your location. That is the most simple, and essential, job that your website content should be doing.
After that, you want your web copy to reflect your brand values and tell your story. What does your company do that is different from your competition? What makes you stand out? Why should someone pick your products or services? What was your road to success and what do you value as a company today? These are all questions that a web copywriter can help you answer in a way that inspires trust, loyalty, and a connection with your customers.
If you’re looking for more advice on copywriting for websites, you can contact us or ask for a quote.
