Before you start making any changes to your web copy, it’s important to read each and every one of your website pages to get an idea of what you have to work with.
After you read through your pages, it’s time to make some changes:
Step 1: Analyze the language: Turn all industry jargon into layman’s terms so that readers can easily determine what your business offers. If you start throwing fancy words and industry terms into the mix, you run the risk of losing your target audience. You want your audience to feel connected to your brand and the only way to do this is by speaking to them in their own language.
Many businesses believe that by using web copy that’s filled with fancy vocabulary and industry terms that they’ll impress prospects. But instead, they make prospects feel uncomfortable and confused, and sometimes even inferior in terms of intelligence.
For example, let’s say you are looking for website design services and you stumble upon a site with homepage copy that reads:
“We specialize in Program Design and troubleshooting, including Web Based e-business and personal web page solutions, DreamWeaver MX web based solutions, Cold Fusion Database solutions, PHP / mySQL Database solutions.”
Would you know what the heck they were talking about? Probably not. And if you couldn’t understand what they were talking about, you wouldn’t feel comfortable purchasing something that you don’t understand.
So, you decide to move on with your search and you happen to fall upon a different website design firm website with homepage copy that reads:
“Our goal is simple… to build the best websites money can buy. Sites that are better than our competitors — and help you beat yours.”
Now that speaks to your needs more than the other website, right?
Step 2: Sell the benefit, not the feature: Of course you want to tell prospects about your product and service features, but you really want to focus your web copy primarily on the benefits that these features provide for prospects.
In a nutshell, a feature is the actual service / product. A benefit is what the customer gets from using this service / product.
If you read through your web copy and find that you are speaking too much about the features of your products and not enough about the benefits that they provide to your customers, then you need to give your web copy a serious facelift.
For example, let’s say you own a travel company and you plan and coordinate corporate event travel. If all you say in your web copy is that you’ve been planning corporate travel trips for 20 years and are a leader in the industry, then you are not speaking to the benefit that you provide customers. Rather, a benefit you provide customers might be that they can rest easy knowing someone is planning and managing every detail of their trip.
Step 3: Remove ALL spelling and grammatical errors: It always comes as a shock to me that so many business websites utilize web copy with spelling and grammatical errors. Always check your web copy to ensure that there are no grammar errors and that every word is spelled correctly. A website that has blatant spelling and grammatical errors screams “low budget.”
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