How to take the pain out of writing your website copy | Website Prep 6: Website Copy

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you're still gonna need a few for your website. Let's make sure they're the right ones!

We're continuing our series about getting your small business ready to launch or refresh your website. HERE’s a link to the playlist. Today, we're talking about a topic that can be tough for a lot of us, myself included... writing copy for our website. In the many groups that I'm a part of, the many conversations I've had with business owners, one topic comes up repeatedly and it holds so many people back from creating or updating their website: Copy.

Copywriting, coming up with the actual text for your website, is a skill that comes naturally to some people (not for me, lol 🤣 ) but it can absolutely be learned! And this is what some people either don't know or don't believe. They think that they could never do this themselves. However, with the right guidance, the right prompts, you - yes, YOU - can write the copy for your website yourself.

Website copy basically has 3 main jobs. The first one is to guide users through your site. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to get around and get the information that they need so that they can make the decision to work with or buy from you.

The next job of your website copy is to help explain your brand. You want to be able to tell your narrative, your story, and have people connect with you in an authentic way. The last job of your website copy is to help sell your goods and services. You need to have great copy explaining what you're offering and why it is the perfect solution to the problem your ideal client is looking to solve.

Here's a fun statistic: 8 out of 10 people only read headlines or skim through the page. Of those that do read more, they only consume about 20% of the content! Less really is more, so make sure that you're making every word count.

74% of web users say that spelling and grammar are something that's important to them. Don’t skip this important step! If this is not your zone of genius, make sure you use a tool like Grammarly to help you out.

One question that I get over and over from small business owners is "should I write my copy in first-person or third-person?" There’s no right or wrong answer here. It really depends on that VOICE of your brand that we covered in an earlier video. Make sure you check that out, if you haven't already.

Really, you just want to make sure that you are consistent across your entire online presence. This includes your website, your social media platforms, and your emails that you send. For example, if you say "I" on your website, you want to be using that throughout all of your other platforms. If you say "we," same thing.

Here's one important note. You do want to be mindful of the level of personal information that you are sharing online. You want to be careful of your safety and privacy. When you think about what type of information you're putting on, say an About Me page or a social media profile.

If, for example, you want to tell your followers what your favorite flavor of ice cream is, that's fine… Unless that happens to be part of your email password! You want to make sure that you're being careful of how much of your personal information that you are sharing publicly.

I'm going to go through a general overview of the copy you can think about for the essential site pages that we covered in last week's video. If you want to get the more detailed copy prompts for all of those pages, you can grab those in my free 10-page website prep checklist HERE.

On the Home page, this is often where most of your visitors are going to land first, so you want to make a really great first impression. This is true for all of the pages, but especially on your Home page, you are going to want to make sure that you have your most important information, what we call "above the fold."

Here are a couple examples below, but basically what it means is on most devices, this is going to be the area that's going to be visible before someone has to scroll.

Your About page can be one of your most-visited pages on your site, so you want to make sure that if you're a service-based business, you have information on your background and credentials. People will want to know what they're going to get when working with you. If you have an e-commerce business, they're going to want to have information on the background of your products, as well as maybe why you started your business.

The Services page is where you can sell yourself and your brand. If you have multiple offers, it might make sense to have multiple sub-pages in your dropdown menu. You want to make sure that you keep the navigation clean and easy to use so that people don't get confused when they're looking at your services and how they can work with you.

Whether or not you choose to include pricing is up to you, your business, your industry, kind of what is standard. Keep in mind that oftentimes clients are coming to your website to find out pricing information, so it may be a good idea to at least include a price range, even if you're not wanting to give exact pricing.

Your Contact page can be separate, or it could just be in the footer of your site. It really depends on how much information you want to include. Are you going to have a form for them to reach out to you? Do you want to include a map? Are you going to have frequently asked questions? Things like that. Just think about how much you want to include and how much space you need to accomplish that.

If you are going to have a Blog on your site - which I highly recommend - at this point, you're going to want to start thinking about the categories and topics that you want to include. Which ones are going to help your search engine optimization (SEO) as well as interest your target audience?

Be sure to come back next week when we are going to delve deeper into legal pages and why they are so important for every small business website. If you want to get a jumpstart on prepping for your website launch, be sure to grab my free website prep checklist HERE.

Let me know in the comments, do you feel more equipped to work on your website copy now?