11 Essential Tips for Writing a Great Website
When you are writing website content, it is essential to know just how you should write it. Who is your target audience? If you have a website, you more than likely have a business that is trying to offer a product or service. Your customers will come to your website in the hopes of solving a problem that they have. It’s important to speak to your customer clearly through your website so they can find what they are looking for as efficiently as possible.
In this guide to writing website content, we’ll go over 11 tips to make your web copy stand out.
1. Dumb it Down
For many people, writing is intimidating. Typically, we don’t freeze up when speaking but when asked to put our words on paper, our mind goes blank. This is all about our mindset. One way to keep your brain from freezing up is to just try and relax. Rather than thinking of a better word and a more sophisticated way to say a specific phrase, just let it flow as if you were speaking. Keep a conversational tone.
One of our best practices for writing web content for our clients is presenting them with four different options. Each paragraph basically says the same thing with the main difference being in tone. We’ll present our clients with four different tones:
- technical
- sales
- conversation
- journalistic
As expected, people always choose the paragraph written in a conversational tone. Now that we have an understanding of the tone websites should be written in, we can easily identify when we start to write like robots.
2. Avoid Long Sentences
When creating a great website design, don’t neglect your content. Considering there are about 400 million active websites, we can easily expect that many of them have bad copy. However, writing website content isn’t as difficult as it may seem. By keeping sentences short and simple, we can improve a website’s content. By avoiding long sentences, visitors will stay on a website longer and eventually will even convert to customers.
Try and keep your sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts to a minimum. People are impatient and won’t actively try to understand what is important on a website. We need to take the guesswork out of what is important when writing website content. Use as few words as possible.
When looking at a web page, users determine quickly if the page is going to be a quick read or if it’s too intimidating and time-consuming. Nowadays, some apps and websites even determine how long a web page takes to read. Don’t expect customers to read every word of any piece of website content. They are only looking to scan the page and look for quick snippets of information.
By breaking up long paragraphs into short, easy-to-digest paragraphs, people are more likely to stick around. Also, bullet lists, headlines and subheads make a page easier to grasp. These practices will also help Google determine what is important in order to assist their users with queries.
3. Stay away from jargon and cliches
Understand that customers may not know the industry like a leading expert. Words or processes that you take for granted are what will cause them to pause, question and ultimately leave the site. Avoid any wording that’s not commonly understood.
Don’t say you went to the ASCPI conference in Vegas last week when you can type out the full name which will help others who aren’t familiar with the American Society for Clinical Pathology.
It’s common to see wording that is purely internal among the business. Don’t rely on potential customers to understand every acronym. Rather than using Red Rocket Web Specialists, we could just refer to ourselves as RRWS but that causes people to ponder what we’re talking about. Don’t be lazy. Type out the whole name.
On term that we throw around a lot around the office is SEO. Our customers may not have an understanding of search engine optimization like we do or may not even know what SEO stands for at all. Put simply, that is jargon. If you are unfamiliar with SEO, it’s the process of tweaking a website so that it’s search-engine friendly which ultimately helps the site rank at the top of the Google search results.
The takeaway here is: don’t use jargon when you’re speaking to people who may not understand it. It’s a lot easier to just use common language to try and describe what you’re talking about. If there is a highly complex topic that is important for customers to understand, try using a metaphor.
Even if your audience understands the subject, it is still important to avoid jargon, which leads us to the next writing tip.
4. Don’t Overthink It
The book Neuromarketing talks about how our brains are wired. It talks a lot about the “caveman brain” and how parts of our brain think differently. The front of the brain thinks about abstract things and can grasp complex ideas.
However, the back of the brain, the part that makes most decisions, is dumb like a caveman. That part of the brain thinks about survival. It’s concerned with things like where it’s going to get its next meal, shelter, and safety. It’s the part of the brain that is very selfish and is only concerned with what’s best for you.
The caveman brain isn’t very sophisticated, making it difficult for your brain to fully comprehend anything. The information has to pass through the front of the brain, hand it off to the caveman brain and spit it out at the other end. If the concept requires too much thinking, most people’s brains will stall out and neglect to get pass that information through to make a decision on it.
By avoiding jargon the caveman brain can handle the lingo and not get hung up trying to figure out what you’re trying to say. Hopefully, the caveman brain in your head didn’t stall out from reading this. Please don’t take that as if I’m being demeaning. It’s just human nature. We all have that same brain structure. It’s not about intelligence. In fact, even the most intelligent people still have a caveman brain.
The caveman brain is a very important part of our lives. It’s the part of the brain that kicks in when you’re about to be hit by a bus. The smarter, front-part of your brain would sit there and analyze the situation, thinking about things like the color of the bus and whether or not those bugs on the rapidly-approaching bumper should be washed off. It’s the caveman brain that tells you to move out of the way.
While the caveman brain is great for getting you to safety, it’s not great at reading comprehension so keep your sentences simple. Avoid the jargon, no matter how intelligent you think your readers may be. Making your website content short, simple, and easy to understand will keep their caveman brain from clicking away.
5. Speak Simply
Picking back up from the caveman brain concept, if you’re ever trying to decide on a better word for a specific term, your copy is more than likely going over your customer’s heads. A good practice when writing website content, is to write copy so that a 7th grader gets it. Even the most intelligent customer base will appreciate the simplicity.
When you write in a way that’s simple and easy to understand, more people get it. Now I could have said more people comprehend it but there’s no need to puff up my writing. Were you insulted when I said people get it rather than comprehend it?
Why use the phrase “core competency” when you can just say that you’re skilled? I get a lot of résumés and most of them have puffed-up language. It’s obnoxious. You don’t want your website design to sound like a résumé so keep it simple.
6. Have Something to Say
One thing that even the caveman part of your brain understands is that, if you want your website content to help rank on Google, you actually need content on the page. Some of the worst websites we’ve created had the promise of content, but the client never followed through.
Because of a lack of content, the sites were launched with several “coming soon” pages because our clients were anxious to put their sites up despite not writing product descriptions. Google often punishes websites with a lack of quality content.
If you have nothing to say about your products, then why would your customer have any reason to buy them? The tips in this guide should give you more than enough advice to make writing website content easy.
7. Have a conversation
Earlier in this guide, we touched on tone. Each of the paragraphs we write for our clients says about the same thing but in different writing styles. The tone varies from very technical to very conversational. The conversational tone is always the go-to.
So what is it that makes the tone conversational? It’s the short sentences. It’s the use of contractions. Use “don’t” instead of “do not.”
Plus, website content speaks to one person at a time, not to a large audience all at once.
A few ways to help your web content sound read in a more conversational tone is to :
- Record your voice explaining your web content and write the playback
- Put a picture of someone in front of you as you write.
- Write your content like you were going to hand a sticky note to somebody
- Example: “Mom, I went out with Tommy. We’ll be back at 3:30” not “Dear Mother, I have decided to visit Tommy. I plan to arrive home by 3:30.”
Using the sticky note example, write you’d, “Mom- went out with Tommy. We’ll be back by 3:30” and not “Dear Mother, I have decided to visit Tommy. I plan to arrive home by 3:30.” Don’t go into that stoic mode.
Keep it simple. Stodgy, formal writing keeps up the wall between you and your readers.
8. Keep a Consistent Tone
Now that you are using a more conversational tone when writing website content, it’s just as important to use a consistent tone throughout. We’ve seen examples of tones changing from page to page. This inconsistency creates a lack of trust in a website.
It’s like dealing with a person with schizophrenia. This subtle problem is prominent across the web as most sites are written by a number of people over a long period of time. Regardless, try to be consistent.
If you talk about yourself in the first person, stick with it. Don’t change from a conversational tone to a professional business tone. Just be consistent throughout all of your content.
9. Be Honest
If you want to write better copy, be honest. Whenever people make claims on their site, it sends up my skeptical radar. As the owner of a website design company, I think to myself, “Oh yeah. Show me the proof.”
The best way to describe this tip is with an anecdote. There are only a couple of products out there that are so great that even I feel like I’m exaggerating when I tell my friends about them. Ask anyone who knows me well and they’ll tell you that I love zip-ties, Magic Erasers, AirBorne and my allergy guy down in Boulder.
I’m constantly telling people about how great my allergy guy is. I just refer to him as “my guy.” He cured my headaches in a couple treatments and I’ve seen him take care of skin ailments, insomnia, depression and more. People think I’m exaggerating when I tell them all of the things he can cure. He even worked on my mom’s cat.
Frankly, I think most of my friends are sick of hearing about my guy because it sounds like I’m exaggerating when I tell them that he can cure most any ailment by just tapping on your spine. In fact, I’ve been allergic to metal for about 20 years now and every time I wear one of my belts, I get a rash on my stomach where the buckle touches my skin. My wife used the same back-tapping techniques and she cured me so I can wear that belt any time now.
Sounds crazy, like I’m either out of my mind or just exaggerating but it’s true. Nevertheless, stories that sound too good to be true are easily dismissed. You’re better off sticking with plausible stories that can be rationally explained, even if you have a product that’s out of this world. Testimonials can be your best friend here. Let the customers speak for themselves about how great your product or service is.
Related: How to Respond to Negative Reviews
10. Don’t Sacrifice Convention
We’re often accustomed to certain things. Stop signs are always red. They’re always octagons. They’re always on the right side of the road. When we’ve become accustomed to these things, we expect them to be that way.
If you’re trying to be clever and break with tradition in your website design, you may wind up regretting it. What if someone decided to make stop signs green? Would people still stop? Think about how confusing it can be to drive on the opposite side of the road in England.
If you’re trying to break all the rules and be creative with your site by thinking outside of the box, it’s the equivalent of dropping your visitors into a round-about in London. They’re likely going to be confused, a little uneasy, and will want out of there. Some conventions work for a reason. Convention isn’t always a bad thing.
We’ve visited thousands of sites over the past decade and have become accustomed to things like “home” or “contact us” and when they change to other, outside-the-box terms, we’re lost.
Keep your website content compelling and fresh but never sacrifice the familiarity people have with the web just to be original in your website design. When a customer sees a button or link on your website, they need to have a clear idea of where it is going to take them or what it will do.
11. Establish Trust
Establish trust by writing flawless copy. You only have one chance to make a first impression.
We’ve all heard it before and we know how important it can be. So then why are there so many sites out there that are riddled with typos? Considering that your website is often the only point of contact that your customers have with your business, why not make it the best that it can be?
When your site is filled with spelling mistakes and other grammatical errors, you quickly erode trust with your customers. They are left wondering if the effort you put into your website is the same as the effort you put into your business. They are led to believe that your product is of similar quality as well.
Trust is the most important thing that you can establish on the internet and when your site doesn’t perform well, you hurt yourself right out of the gates. Use these tips to clean up your content and take the intimidation out of writing website content in the first place.