Copywriting

Imagine arriving at a stately home or (my favourite) a boutique hotel. You walk in through the front door and instantly feel at ease. The beautiful decor, fresh flowers and welcoming receptionist ready to look after you. You’re welcomed and invited to be guided to your room, shown to the bar or the spa. It’s a great start to a wonderful stay.

I always think that a website’s homepage should be just like an entrance hall to a stately home. Warm, welcoming and easy to navigate to where you want to go next.

Some websites give you too many options on the homepage and it becomes overwhelming (imagine the receptionist saying – I can show you to your room, the spa, the bar, the restaurant, the golf club, the tennis courts, the croquet lawn, the beach, the… – you get the picture – you forget what she said at the beginning!).

Other websites leave you standing there – leaving you to find your own way through the “house”. That’s why we’ll almost always use navigational bugs on the homepage to guide people around a site.

Worst of all… imagine after a long drive arriving at the stately home. Rather than asking how you are and showing you what you need to find, the owner shakes you by the hand and starts telling you his life history. Yawn!

Are you with me so far on this analogy? Your homepage isn’t the place to tell people about your business – save that for your about page. Sure – they need to know what you do – they need to be sure they’ve come to the right place. After that, talk to them about their challenges and how you help, you’ll find you get a much better response.

Your homepage should welcome, guide and show visitors on to the meatier parts of your site. A bit like an entrance hall!

Image: Brockett Hall

Tagged as in Copywriting, Web Design, Websites

Why do you click on About Us pages when you’re browsing a website? Idle curiosity perhaps? A desperate attempt to find out who this company is and what they do? A desire to find out more about the person or people behind the brand and connect further?

In my case all of the above apply at different times.

I’m the first person to say that the copy on your website should be about your customer and their challenges rather than your business. But the same rules don’t apply to your About Us page. Your About page is your opportunity to talk about yourself as much as you darn well please.

It’s a bit like being at a party. You do all the right things – ask the right questions, listen, strike up a rapport and then the other person asks you about yourself. You need to answer! On your website your About page is your perfect opportunity to reinforce your brand position, qualify why you’re ideally placed to provide your product or service and most importantly, connect with your reader.

Vicki Knights, the photographer at the top of this post, does this brilliantly. She talks from the heart – reassures me, provides a little about herself that I can identify with and also explains (without boring me) why she’s qualified to do what she does so well. Importantly, she’s also got a great photo – eyes at the camera looking relaxed, engaging and reassuring.

Take a look at your About Us page – is it easy for people to see why they should do business with you? Can they see, literally see, who is behind the business? And have you reinforced your brand position?

Tagged as in Copywriting, Marketing, Websites

I guess the short answer to that question is yes and no.

Yes in that writing for the web forces you to take account of the search engines and making sure that what you’re writing reflects what people want to know. But a big, fat, enormous no in that to write truly powerful copy you simply *have* to write for your customers and not for yourself. Great copy attracts, engages and galvanises people into action.

Great copy answers questions that your readers have; shows them that you can solve their problem/ inspires them and entices them to put their trust and hard earned cash your way. It’s very simple really. And to be honest, writing for the web should be no different to writing for your readers.

Sure, you need to make sure that your website gets found. But if you understand *at the outset* what people are looking for in your niche; what people want to know about your product or service then it really isn’t rocket science. Now I’m telling you all this as a copywriter, not as an SEO expert (which I don’t profess to be). But just think about it for a moment. Truly bad copy (and we all see plenty of that about ) often starts out with a headline that bears no resemblence to what follows in the paragraph below. Writing for the web forces you to stay focused. If you want to get found for bespoke kitchens in Surrey; well then you need to make sure you use those words in what you’re writing. And so that it makes sense to the humans that are invariably going to read your website if your SEO ninja tricks pay off; then you need to make sure that the whole paragraph, or better still the whole page is around that theme too – just so that it makes sense…

I’m currently writing two pieces of copy for Stanbrook and Nicholson, a local joinery company based in the Surrey Hills. One is for their brochure, one is for their website. I’m pretty well placed to write this at the moment because we’re currently in the process of starting an extension, so I know exactly what their clients want to know.

I started by writing their brochure. Izzy and I planned out the structure a couple of weeks back, I interviewed the team and we’re now in the process of writing up. I still find it easier to write for people first – call me old fashioned but I have more love for them than robots. We’ve decided that the brochure is going to let the pictures do the talking so it was all about writing short, sharp, evocative paragraphs that told a story.

I then translated this to their web copy. Web doesn’t bring the space constraints with it that printed literature too – so we can allow ourselves the luxury of a few extra pages – more detail on the team and their environmental policy perhaps. It’s at this point that things start to get a bit more focused. With the help of my (now friend) Google and a few other tools I’m looking at various keywords – what people are searching for, what the competition is like, and how we can be different.

At the bottom of each page I’m specifying the keywords I think should be relevant to this page. That’s partly for my own sanity – to make sure each important one is covered off, and mostly to keep me focused. If I want to get found for bespoke kitchens surrey then I need to use those words – and there were places on relevant pages that I hadn’t.

So yes, writing for the web is slightly different to writing for print. But surely it’s just about a bit of discipline in giving the readers what they want? And let’s be honest, we could all use a bit of that!

Tagged as in Copywriting, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Websites

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Tagged as in Copywriting, Marketing, Online Marketing, Websites

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Tagged as in Copywriting

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Tagged as in Copywriting, Marketing, Websites, Workshops

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Tagged as in Copywriting

I've blogged on this before, but as I now have a lot more copywriters following me via twitter I'd be really interested to know what you all think. This morning I received this link to a page by Paul Fuggle, guru of Total Business Cart.com and the shopping cart I use for my workshops. Now [...]

Tagged as in Copywriting

One of the biggest mistakes lots of companies make when writing for their website is to write all about themselves. Well, newsflash! Your clients don't want to hear about you on your homepage. They want to hear all about the solutions you provide to help them with their problems. So think from a different angle. [...]

Tagged as in Copywriting

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Tagged as in Copywriting, Marketing