Improve your Web Content with better Copy in 4 Quick Steps

The market is very competitive. Before you spend time and money to direct your target audience to your website, you’ll want to brush up on the content. Because if your content and copy isn’t up to scratch, your visitors will click away and that will be a wasted effort.

Here are 5 steps to ensure your site visitors don’t click away within the first three seconds of visiting your landing page:

First impressions matter.

The layout of your landing page matters. A lot. This will involve a good page design, which presents your content in a way that’s inviting and pleasant to engage with. By content, we mean your copy, visuals/images and other elements.

Give them an easy read.

Present your copy in manageable, bite-sized portions that encourage reading. Here are some basic to-dos:

• Keep your paragraphs short.

• Have subheadings that grab attention.

• Have subsections that present your main ideas.

• Use visuals/images to break up the page.

• Use bullet points. People like bullet points.

Keep it brief, keep it Real.

To stand out from the crowd and grab attention, your copy needs to be brief and to the point. Because saving your audience time and making their lives easier does two things:

1. It inspires their trust

2. It demonstrates brand confidence.

Take care that your introduction gets to your point quickly. And then cut out all the fluff! Offering unnecessary information or repeating yourself will put your audience off.

Less is often more.

So, what should my word count be? – you ask.

Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast rule that applies across the board. The correct word length for you depends entirely on the complexity of your message and who your audience is.

The general guideline for content length and density on a webpage ranges from 200 to 1,000 words:

• For SEO purposes, word length should ideally be between 200 to 400 words.

• For the benefit of your audience, 500 to 700 words is more than sufficient (until they commit to reading more).

But have you actually seen 700 words on a webpage? That’s still a lot of words, and for the average page visitor, hardly brief!

Use structural tricks.

Sometimes copy needs to be long, and that’s fine, so long as every word has a purpose. In this scenario, you need to package it all so it doesn’t feel like a chore and your main message gets across even if some readers stop reading. Here are two of our top tricks for optimal copy performance:
 

• Break your copy down into bite-sized subsections with engaging headings.

• Use the reverse pyramid style.

What’s the Reverse Pyramid style? It’s where you offer your audience the most important facts first. If they choose not to read the rest of your page, that’s fine, because you’ve got your main message across. We cover more of this in our blog about the Reverse Pyramid Style here.