You’ve probably answered the same questions about your business more times than you can remember. What you do, who you work with, what something costs and how the whole thing works.
Your website needs to answer those questions too. The difference is that you won’t be there to explain anything the visitor hasn’t understood.
That’s why the words deserve as much thought as the design. Good photographs can show your work and a well designed page can make it easy to find things. The wording helps someone understand what they’re looking at and whether your business is right for them.
What do we mean by website copy
Copy is simply the written content on your website. It includes your service descriptions, headings, buttons and the short explanations around a contact form.
It doesn’t need to sound like an advert. Often, the most useful copy sounds like the explanation you’d give a customer who’d asked a sensible question.
The skill is deciding what that customer needs to know, putting it in the right order and explaining it clearly. Knowing your subject doesn’t always make that easy. When something’s familiar to you, it’s quite natural to leave out details someone else needs.
Your customers need a reason to choose you
Phrases such as great service and high quality don’t give people much to work with. Most businesses would say the same about themselves.
The details are more helpful. What does your service include. Who is it suitable for. How do you approach the work, and what should a customer expect after getting in touch.
If each job needs a quote, explaining what affects the price can make the process less uncertain. If you only work within a particular area or with certain types of customer, saying so helps people decide whether to enquire.
Relevant reviews, genuine examples of your work and current qualifications can support that explanation. They need to be accurate and appropriate to the service you’re describing. You don’t need to make a bigger claim when a specific detail will do the job.
It should sound like your business
Someone who’s met you shouldn’t find a completely different personality on your website. If you’re straightforward and approachable in conversation, the copy should feel that way too.
That doesn’t mean writing every page exactly as you’d speak. A conversation lets you notice a confused expression and explain something differently. Website copy needs to anticipate that moment.
It also needs to make the next step clear. A visitor might be interested but unsure whether a form starts a paid booking or simply requests a conversation. A short explanation can answer that before they have to ask.
There’s a search benefit to being useful
The names of your services, the areas you cover and the questions you answer help explain what a page is about. That’s useful to visitors and gives search engines information they can work with.
Google recommends helpful content written for people. It doesn’t have a preferred word count that makes a page rank, and adding more paragraphs won’t rescue a page that hasn’t answered the question.
Advice articles can help with questions people have before they’re ready to enquire. Your service pages can then explain what you offer. Each has a different job, but they should make sense together.
At Plastic Box Digital Marketing, we’d start by understanding your business and what customers need to know before recommending changes to the wording. Sometimes a page needs a thorough rewrite. Sometimes the offer is sound and a few missing explanations are making it harder to understand.
If your website doesn’t quite sound like you, or leaves you explaining the same things after every enquiry, get in touch. We can talk through where the wording could be more useful.