Alice

I had a bit of a rude awakening the other day when an expert told me off about my webcopy.

My trouble is I think visually, which sometimes I concentrate too much on how a website should look. This isn’t necessarily how pretty it is, but how the visitor views the page when they enter the site – but that’s a subject for another post…

I was working on unravelling some webcopy for a client, bringing it out of its corporate mode and into the customers’ point of view, using bullet points for quick scanning properties, working on the call to action to command a response, and thinking hard about the headline.

It’s important to put into practice these questions visitors might think when writing webcopy: ‘Is this the right website?’ leading to ‘Does this page contain the information I need?’ and then ‘Now what can I do here?’ – making sure there is suitable navigation to back you up.

But the well-meaning expert pointed out to me the lack of keywords, not only in the headline and the copy, but also the page title as well. Since this webcopy was for a specific landing page for an Adwords campaign, it’s important to be aware of matching up keywords with those used in the adverts themselves.

There were other factors to consider as well: give the spiders and therefore the search engines enough fodder to work on, so at least 200 words using no more than 10% of keywords, thinking at the same time to make it readable and focused totally on the audience’s point of view. There is nothing worse than a piece of text totally given way to keywords, it can be desperately boring to the initiated and a turn off for the rest.

And there should be a goal set up for your campaign – where do you want your visitor to go to, eg a contact form – and Google Analytics can easily trace these actions, to prove whether the call to action is working in conjunction with the number of bounces from your landing page.

So there’s a lot to think about when writing a webpage – hopefully making you aware that this kind of writing is not easy!