Writing Content for Your Website

Great content is the key to a great website. We always recommend getting an experienced copywriter to do this for you because they know how to write well, know what is needed from a website and give a viewpoint from outside of your business. But, for cost, authenticity or other reasons many people choose to create their own website content.

Focus on your visitor

Everything you write needs to be done from the point of view of your visitors. Do you know your target market and who these visitors will be (see our article on customer profiles)? It can help to think about a particular person or your ideal client as you write. Talk about how you can help them and the problems they may have.

What do you offer?

On the internet, attention spans are short. Explaining what you offer needs to become obvious in the first sentence or two. For some businesses, their name helps with this. But even if you have ‘accounts’ in your business name, that doesn’t explain your offer or how you are different from other accountants. Ensure your offer is clear and easy to explain. If it takes more than two or three sentences you will lose visitors interest.

What help do visitors want?

Visitors will generally come to your website because they have a problem. When is the last time you browsed a heating engineers website when your heating was working fine? Visitors usually have a problem and they’re looking to see how you can help. What problems do your products or services solve? Visitors aren’t interested in you or your product. They are interested in how you can help them solve their problems.

What do I want visitors to do?

Think carefully about what you would like a visitor to do before they leave your website. Call you, email you, get your free download (take a look at our ‘lead magnets‘ article).

Once you have decided on your call-to-action message, you need to add specific call-to-action to all of your pages. These are usually a button or links. They tell your visitors what to do. “Get your free consultation”, “Find out more about how we can help you”. They direct visitors. Without them, your website will gain very few leads. Without them, a visitor gets to the end of the section they are reading and will simply leave your website.

Testimonials

These build trust and reputation. Display these around your website rather than having a ‘testimonials page’. That way you are forcing visitors to see them as they browse. Visitors are far more likely to listen to another client saying how great you are than you doing it. If you don’t have any testimonials then start asking for them. Make it an integral part of your processes that you ask clients for testimonials.

Prices

This is a balance. You don’t normally want visitors to simply compare your prices to other competitors. But, in comparison, if you are vague and opaque about costs, that can put visitors off too. Fixed price products and services are easy to explain. Try to package them differently from your competitors to avoid direct price comparisons. If your costs vary, some examples of work with costs could really help a visitor get an idea of the scale of the cost of working with you.

Detail

Your webpage needs some detail and content. This needs to be structured in the right way and in the right place. The front of the website needs lots of single sentences, short paragraphs and great images. Clean succinct writing to get your message across. Further down, more detail is good. Detail helps Google work out what you do and some visitors love that extra information. Nothing to text dense. Everything still needs breaking up with paragraphs, bullet points or tables and arranged into relevant sections. But some detail is good.

Proofreading and checking

There are some great tools to help with this. Hemmingway looks at the quality of your writing. It looks at various issues and gives your work a readability grade. Aim for grade six or below to keep it easy to read and comprehend (website visitors generally don’t like having to ‘work out’ what you do through impenetrable language!).

Grammarly is a spelling and grammar checker and it’s excellent. There is a premium version available, but I’m not sure it’s needed. Remember to read the text yourself, or even better, get someone else to read it. Their view, from outside the business will be invaluable. After reading it, can they tell you how your business can help people?

Writing Content – Our Conclusion

Professionally written text makes for a professional website – fact!

If you do write it yourself remember to plan your writing and to aim it at your ideal client. Talk about solving visitors problems. Write clearly and concisely. Add some detail further into the website. Use testimonials on every page. Call to action are vital to turn visitors into leads and prospects. Format your text carefully avoiding long chunks of plain text. Check your writing using online tools and people. Enjoy the writing.

Don’t get bogged down in the technicalities of what you do – write in a conversational style to engage your readers. Consider using professional copy writers and proof readers to create a consistent ‘voice’ for your website – they’ll also remember to add in the calls to action.

Yorkshire Powerhouse thinking on writing content

Have you any questions?

Here at Yorkshire Powerhouse, we’re happy to help as much as possible – is there anything else we can do to help you, do you have any further questions or can we help introduce you to an expert – please let us know: