October 16, 2020

6 tips for good website copy

Reading on the desktop follows its own rules. People who access a website on the Internet want to be informed quickly and easily. Website texts are often not read in full. Visitors skim the headings and only pick out the most relevant section. If you write your website texts as you would write a novel, you will lose many visitors to your website. So if you want to write texts for your website, you should follow a few small tips to ensure that your texts are informative and helpful for your readers. In the following blog post, we therefore want to give you the 6 best tips for writing website texts and thus ensure that your text is a success.

6 tips on how to write perfect copy for your website

1. No good copy without planning

Just sitting down and writing away might work if you want to write a short story for your pleasure in your spare time or simply want to let your thoughts run free. However, writing a website copy without prior planning is not recommended. Good planning prevents you from forgetting important aspects. It helps you establish a good, clear structure and research all the necessary information beforehand. I would therefore recommend doing some research before you start writing and defining the structure, headings and subheadings. This way you can perhaps get some inspiration in advance. Take a look at your competitors or partner sites and ask yourself the following questions before starting the writing process:

How should I reach out to my target group?
What are the most important aspects?
How do I want to structure the copy?
What are suitable headlines?

2. Clear structure and outline

Structure your texts with headings, subheadings and paragraphs. In the fast-paced Internet, no one wants to have to go through a lengthy text before they get to the information they need. Paragraphs, important words in bold and headings are therefore an absolute must if you want your website to stand out from the masses.

You should also mention the most important points at the beginning of your text and then move on to less important points. Visitors to your site decide within seconds whether this website is relevant to them or not. The attention span of Internet users is short. For this reason, you should get the important information across as quickly as possible. The 5 W questions (Who, Where, What, When, Why?) can be helpful here. Try to answer these in the first paragraph.

3. Meaningful headlines

Meaningful headlines are an advantage when it comes to attracting attention. Visitors usually only skim the headings before deciding whether the text is relevant to them. For this reason, you should choose headlines that arouse interest and announce what is described in the following paragraph.

4. Informative and simple style of writing

Foreign words, technical terms, very lengthy sentences and passive sentence structures should be avoided in website copy. Write the way you speak. Simple and informative. Unnecessarily complicated sentences disrupt the reading flow of your visitors and make them more likely to leave your website. As a rule, more than two commas per sentence is usually too many. Of course, exceptions prove the rule. If a sentence simply can be read better if you use more commas, then do so. Overall, you should see the tips presented here for exactly what they are: Tips. They are not rules or laws. If you deviate from them for good reasons, that’s fine. Writing simply and informatively, for example, is probably an advisable tip for 95% of websites. However, if you are writing a website for a scientific community, you might want to deviate from this tip.

5. Use Keywords

A good website text should not only be optimized for visitors but also for search engines. Even the best text on your website is of little use if it cannot be found. For this reason, you should use relevant keywords in your texts. If you are writing a text about a festival, you should probably mention the name of this festival frequently. Just like the location and the theme of the festival. For example, relevant keywords for such a text could be “techno festival Aachen” and “techno music festival”. These terms should then appear frequently in your text. We also describe how you can determine and enter relevant keywords for your website in our blog post “How to do SEO – keywords”. Also take a look at here .

6. Match the target group’s language

Before you even start writing the text, you should ask yourself a few questions about your target group:

Who is my target group?
How does my target group want to be approached?
What kind of writing style should I choose? Emotional? Informative?

Put yourself in the position of your target group and ask yourself what they are looking for in your text. Think about the style you want to follow right from the start. After all, it is very irritating if you start a text very informatively and without much emotion and then describe your product very emotionally in the next paragraph. A competitor analysis can also be helpful. How do my competitors approach their customers? What is good, what can I do better? These questions should definitely be clarified before you start writing.

Checklist for good website copy

That was quite a lot of material. For this reason, it should be mentioned once again that the above are just tips. If you deviate from them, this will not necessarily have negative consequences. However, these tips are based on experience, which shows when texts work well on the Internet and are read with pleasure and when they are not. We have compiled a checklist for you below so you can check once for yourself whether your text is suitable for a website.

Checklist for good website copy:

The website text is well structured.
The most important points have already been mentioned in the first paragraph.
The text is structured in paragraphs and subheadings.
The headlines are meaningful and attract the reader’s interest.
Keywords were used.
No endlessly long sentences were used.
Not too many passives were used.
Not too many technical terms were used.
The sentences are short, informative and easy to read.
The language of the text is matching the target group.
The style of the text is consistent.

If you stick to these simple points, nothing stands in the way of your perfect website copy.
If you have any further questions about good website copy or would like to get SEO-optimized, good copy written for you, just get in touch.