Techniques for Writing More Effective Online Copy

Writing for an online audience isn’t easy. Writing convincing copy and using appropriate keywords improves search engine optimization, and as a result betters your website traffic and brings in more revenue to your online business. In order to best balance readable and direct online copy with copy that ranks well with search engines, you need to employ specific copywriting techniques.

Here, we’ll outline some of those effective copywriting for the web techniques.

Find the Target – and Write to Them:

The first step to writing effective online copy is knowing who you’re writing for. What age are your readers? What gender are they? How much knowledge do they already have regarding your product? Once you know this, it’s important to come up with a series of keywords or key terms, which you can then pepper throughout your copy in order to best reach the target market. This is important, as it helps to ensure that you are not alienating anyone with your language, but rather bringing like-minded people to your website, which in turn increases your online sales.

Bring Them in With the Headline:

People are busy. When they get to your website, they don’t have time to look around to find what they are looking for. The most effective websites use headlines to draw the reader in and entice them to read the body copy, which should also be short and direct. People will not spend time online wading through paragraphs of copy, unless they have been initially drawn in by an effective headline, which explains exactly what they will be reading about.

Include a Call to Action:

As we already said, people are busy. Make it easy for them to contact you via your website. Include a “Contact Us” or “Email Us Now” link, so that all they have to do is simply click on a link in order to be in touch. Don’t make it necessary for your readers to write down your phone number or email address, because the odds are they wont, as they’ll be on to your competitor’s website if yours is too complicated. If you don’t include “Contact Us” links throughout your copy as a call to action, make sure you absolutely have a “Contact Us” page, where your address (if you have one) is listed, along with your phone number, email address and social networking pages.

If you’re running an online store, make sure your “Purchase” or “Buy Now” button is easy to find and directly beside the product, again, making it simple for your customer. You don’t want to lose a sale because it wasn’t easy enough. Being able to share the content on your website should also be easy for your customers, so that they can advertise to their social network for you, which of course, is free!