If your website copy isn’t attracting, engaging and retaining customers, it’s costing you money.
2014 will be another record-breaking year for UK online sales, with 17% growth predicted by the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. To profit from this boom, increased website traffic isn’t enough. Every element of your online presence has to be perfectly tuned and targeted to offer visitors an outstanding web experience. An experience that converts interest into sales.
The words you use to talk to your customers are key to shaping that experience. Great copywriting chimes with customers’ concerns, wins their trust, influences their decision-making and persuades them to act. If you don’t connect with your customers through your website copy, chances are, they’ll spend their money with a retailer who does.
So, how can you make sure your website copy is earning its keep?
Research from the Missouri University of Science and Technology shows that visitors don’t read websites but scan them for clues. They cement their impressions of you within 2.6 seconds of accessing your website. In this rapid-fire world, words matter less, right? Wrong.
Online, you get one chance, so get to the point and make it relevant. Put your key messages upfront. Cut out jargon, long sentences and break down detail using bullet points.
Above all, don’t expect your visitors to take the slightest bit of interest in you. Their sole concern is how they can benefit from your offering. It should be your focus too. Be explicit about how you can meet their needs and address their concerns and you will ease the decision-making process along - from browsing to buying.
Speak to one of our website copywriters today and get advice on how to use words to convert interest into sales.
Gut instinct isn’t enough
High traffic and low sales is a sure sign your web copy would benefit from a systematic audit.
Understanding how people use websites generally will help you refine web tools and sequence information logically to make your value proposition irresistible. Understand how people use your website in particular and you can develop your web copy even further, into a strategic business tool.
Ongoing analysis of your customers’ online interactions will highlight how their knowledge, habits and priorities shift and change. Use that insight to mould your website copy and it will stay relevant, meaningful and focused on their needs. And you’ll stay one step ahead of the competition.
Increase understanding to increase sales.
But strategic concerns should never override quality. Even search engines prefer well-written copy.
Search engines increasingly understand human behaviour and align their algorithms with it. They dislike dense, repetitive writing just as much as humans and have lost their taste for websites stuffed with keywords. Use relevant keywords carefully and use synonyms and grammatical variations of key concepts to keep the copy natural and flowing. Robots and humans alike will thank you.
Regularly up-dated content will keep your customers and the search engines coming back for more. Marketing specialists Hubspot claim a company blog can double traffic and in-bound leads. Copied content, on the other hand, will jar with readers, make your copy disjointed and may fall foul of Google’s duplicating filter, not to mention copyright law.
Copy optimisation is as important to your online success as search engine or design optimisation.
Get advice on optimising your website copywriting to make conversion rates soar. Contact us now.
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