When it comes to writing copy on the Internet, content is king. The copy on a Web page is a hardworking multitasker. It needs to provide information to visitors, engage with them, and lead them to perform a desired action—all while conveying brand ethos. It also needs to provide context and relevance to search engines. And it needs to achieve all this fluidly without appearing to be trying too hard.
Copywriting is a fundamental element of effective online marketing. Whether writing an e-mail to a colleague or PPC (pay-per-click) advertisements for a new product launch, learning how to write effective online copy will make you a better communicator.
Online copywriting entails everything from the copy of Web site pages, to the content of an e-mail, and all written elements in between. From eight-hundred-word WebPR (Web public relations) articles to three-line PPC advertisements, if it’s being read on a screen, it’s online copy. Ultimately, you are writing on the Web to meet business objectives, so it is important to never sway from the strategic element and potential of your online copy.
Focus on writing in a strategic, persuasive, compelling manner.
When writing for the Web, it does not mean that traditional approaches to copywriting need to be ditched. The foundations remain—they just need to be adapted to an online environment. The first step you need to take is to research your target audience, understand their needs, and write copy that solves their problems and answers their questions while engaging with them.
Understanding your audience will guide you in determining the topics that they want to read about and will help you to organize information in a way that makes sense to your audience. It will direct the tone of your copy as well as the content.
Sometimes it helps to write for just one person. Pick out someone you know who fits your audience, or make someone up, and write for that person. In copywriting, this person who fits your audience is a personaA character used to represent a group of visitors to a Web site..
The Internet has led to an audience of one.Jonathan Price and Lisa Price, Hot Text: Web Writing That Works (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002). What does this mean? While your audience is not literally one person (and if it is, thank your mom for reading your Web site, but spend some time on growing your readership), it is not a vast, vaguely defined crowd. Instead, online we have many niche audiences who are used to being addressed as individuals. Online, many of the individuals in our audience also exchange information via blogs, forums, and other forms of social media.
Holly Buchanan of FutureNow (http://www.futurenowinc.com) sums this up with three questions you should ask:
Personas are based on the profile of readers of your copy—the visitors to your Web site and potential customers. Creating a profile is all about considering the needs and desires of your Web site visitors and effectively meeting them. For example, How do they make purchase decisions? Do they compare lots of service providers before selecting one? Do they make lists of questions and call in for assistance with decision making? Or do they make purchase decisions spontaneously based on a special offer?
Web site copy can be structured in such a way that it caters for several personas, but you need to spend time understanding their needs before you are able to write copy that addresses these needs with conviction.
Understanding the profiles of your readers is an important element, and the best copy usually results from extensive time spent figuring out who your audience is.
When writing on behalf of clients, it is very important that you have clearly understood what their corporate “personality” is so that you can convey this in your copy without deviating from their corporate identity or diluting their brand ethos.
Writing an online copy—guidelines document will enable you to fall back on the styles, conventions, and voice that you are required to write for. Understanding and sticking to this corporate voice is just as important as the audience you are tailoring your content for. The two need to work together and draw from one another for direction.
By sticking to style conventions, you will assist the audience in familiarizing themselves with author personas. This way, they will know what bits of content go where in a document, and this allows for easier navigation.
Online copy is judged first and foremost on its layout, regardless of the content. It needs to appear to be well structured and easy to read before a visitor will choose to read it.
A good online copywriter will also be able to use basic HTML (hypertext markup language), knowing that it is the appealing layout of the page that will get their words read. It should be easy for users to skip and skim the copy, effortlessly finding the parts that are most relevant to them.
Online copy should be pleasant to read and easy to scan. This means making use of the following:
It’s easy to see this in practice.
Figure 14.1 What Text Looks Like after It Has Been Edited for Online
Readers online are usually strapped for time and need to decide quickly whether or not to read a page. This means that the most important information needs to be at the top of the page. Start with the summary or conclusion—the main idea or gist of the article.
Figure 14.2 The Structure of Online Copy
While clever wordplay in headings and titles can attract some attention, online these need to be written as descriptively as possible. The copy is multitasking: not only is it informing visitors of what to expect, it is also telling search engine spiders what the page is about. Be creative, but keep it relevant.
HTML stands for hypertext markup language, and it’s the foundation of documents on the Internet. HTML tags tell browsers how to present content. HTML tags are in the brackets that look like arrows: < and >.
When writing online copy, you can use an HTML editor, where you insert the tags yourself, or a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which works in a similar way to a word processor.
Basic HTML is simple to implement and will help you to lay out your content in an easy-to-read way. Here are some basic HTML tags:
The tags also help search engines to identify how the content has been laid out on the page.
The best way to get to grips with HTML is to start using it online where you can see how the tags work.
Online copy often has only a limited amount of space and short amount of time to get a message across to visitors and entice them to take action. This is especially true of banner advertising and PPCAdvertising on search engines. (pay-per-click) advertisements on search engines, but it is also is important across all eMarketing disciplines. The most important short copy of online marketing is the call to action (CTA)Words used to encourage a prospect to take a particular action..
A crucial element to online copywriting is the CTA. Users scan Web pages and look for clues as to what to do. Don’t make them think; tell them what action to perform.
A call to action is a short, descriptive instruction that explicitly tells a Web visitor what to do. Banner advertising usually involves a clear call to action, and it can also be used in paid search advertising. Call-to-action copy is not limited to short copy: e-mail newsletters and promotions should also make use of call to action, and we even see them all over Web pages. Calls to action should always be above the fold to drive action.
Use active verbs for sentences in the active voice. This sentence is in the active voice. Passive verbs can be used but tend to make for less instructive copy. Passive voice is being used in this sentence.
Any time that there is an action that you want a Web visitor to take, a call to action should instruct the visitor what to do. This means using active verbsIn a call to action, it is the word that conveys action or behavior. when you write and crafting hyperlinks to be clear instructions that resonate with your visitor at each step in the conversion process.
A strong call to action resonates with the action that the visitor needs to take, as opposed to the technical function that is performed. For example, if a user has entered an e-mail address to sign up to your e-mail newsletter, the action button should say “sign up” (which is what a user understands) and not “submit” (which is the database action).
Consider what actions mean offline:
Whereas subscriptions connote regularity as to the times when newsletters are sent (e.g., once a week, on a particular day at a particular time), “sign up” does not carry the same burden. There is only one way to know what call to action works best on a Web page, in an e-mail, on a banner, or in an advertisement: test, test, test. You could do this by performing A/B split tests to see which CTA drives the most clicks or actions.
Writing compelling copy means conveying to readers why they should perform an action. While featuresA prominent aspect of a product that is beneficial to users. may seem all-important, you need to communicate the benefitsThe positive outcome for a user that a feature provides. of the features to the user, as this is the ultimate driver of action. Features and benefits are described as follows:
Features and benefits are very different. Features are what are important to the company that provides the product or service. Benefits are what are important to those who decide to use the product or service. This part of the copy could be the make-or-break selling point, so be direct and illustrate why they should choose your product instead of your competitor’s.
For example, consider a home entertainment system. Features could include surround sound and a large flat-screen television. The benefit is a cinema-quality experience in your own home.
Persuasive writing makes use of features, benefits, and active verbs to create appealing messages for your personas: Enjoy cinema-quality movie nights in your own home with a surround sound home entertainment system.
Be personal, be descriptive, and illustrate that their needs will be met and even surpassed.
PPC advertisements have a very limited space, and very limited time, to get a message across, as well as plenty of competition for an Internet user’s attention. These four lines of copy need to work hard to be convincing and compelling to ensure a top return on investment.
PPC advertisements follow the same basic structure:
A heading in PPC advertising looks like the following:
Two lines of advertisement copy,
Which can be displayed on one line
www.DisplayURL.com
Refer to Chapter 7 "Pay per Click Advertising" for Google’s editorial guidelines.
When the copy of the advertisement matches the user’s search term, those words are often displayed in bold in the advertisement. This makes the advertisement more prominent and can improve click-through rates. This is also why keyword research is very important.
For example, if the search term used was “roses,” an advertisement with “roses” in the copy might look like this:
Roses for Valentine’s
A dozen red roses for your love;
Fast, free delivery in RSA.
www.flowers.co.za/roses
Using keywords in the advertisement copy can help improve click-through rates. However, this can mean writing thousands of advertisements—one for each keyword in the PPC campaign! The paid search advertising platforms have a neat tool to bypass this problem: dynamic keyword insertionIn paid search advertising, this allows keywords used in searches to be inserted automatically into advertisement copy..
Dynamic keyword insertion allows for the search term used to be inserted into the advertisement copy. This means that you can write one advertisement, and every time it appears for a different search term, that search term will be inserted into the advertisement. In the copy for the advertisement, it looks like this:
{keyword:alternative word}
The brackets indicate that this is where the dynamic keyword should go. The copywriter also needs to select an alternative keyword to show if the search term used does not fit into the space available.
Google’s tutorial on dynamic keyword insertion has the following examples that explain this best.Google, “How Do I Use Keyword Insertion?” tutorial, Google AdWords Help Center, http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&query=dki&answer=74996&type=f (accessed June 17, 2008).
The following advertisement text is created:
Brand-New {KeyWord:Phones}
Huge selection of phones. Great prices.
{Keyword:phones} in stock. Free shipping!
www.BestDealer.com
The previous advertisement is then seen by searchers as the following:
Advertisement 1. Keyword: nokia n90
Brand-New Nokia N90
Huge selection of phones. Great prices.
Nokia n90 in stock. Free shipping!
www.BestDealer.com
Advertisement 2. Keyword: samsung d500
Brand-New Samsung D500
Huge selection of phones. Great prices.
Samsung D500 in stock. Free shipping!
www.BestDealer.com
Advertisement 3. Keyword: motorola razor silver
Brand-New Phones
Huge selection of phones. Great prices.
Phones in stock. Free shipping!
www.BestDealer.com
With limited word count available, it can seem a daunting task to communicate information that entices the right traffic to click through and that differentiates you from your competition. Testing variations of copy is the best way to determine what works best for your campaign.
Online copywriting is not just about short, sharp, call-to-action copy; however, Web users tend to scan pages quickly to determine whether or not they will read further. Even when writing longer copy, you need to take this into consideration.
Longer online copy allows you to foster a relationship with a reader, whether it is on a blog, through e-mail communications, or through articles and news releases. With more words and space available to use, you are able to establish a voice and a personality to make your copy more convincing and personal.
Titles and subject lines are there for a very important reason: they inform readers whether or not they are likely to want to read further by giving a sneak preview into what is to come in the article. They are the gateway to your content.
Consider the following two titles:
The second title conveys more information to the reader that helps the reader decide to read further. Minor word manipulation that tells the reader how he or she will benefit from reading that content can make a huge difference.
Subject lines are like titles for e-mails and can make the difference between an e-mail being deleted instantly and being opened and read. Subject lines also work hand in hand with the “from” field of an e-mail. Both fields usually appear side by side in an in-box and are used to determine relevance, familiarity, and trust.
Use a consistent and easy-to-recognize sender aliasThe name that is chosen to appear in the sender or “from” field of an e-mail.—the “from” field—so that readers can recognize your e-mails easily. With familiarity and trust established using this field, the subject line can be used more creatively, allowing you to build on the already-established relationships with your readers.
As with a title, use the subject line to make clear what the e-mail is about. For example, if there is a promotion in the e-mail, consider putting it in the subject line as well.
Titles, headlines, and subject lines need to be both persuasive and enticing. Consider what need your copy is meeting for your readers and express that first. Be honest and straightforward and never misrepresent the content of an e-mail as this will prevent readers from opening them in the future.
As well as the copy on the Web page, HTML (hypertext markup language) tags and metadata are also used by a search engine optimization (SEO)Aiming to improve rankings in search engines. copywriter. In addition to assisting you with structuring your content, these tags indicate relevancy and context to search engines. Some of the tags are used by screenreaders, and so they assist visitors with disabilities to access your content. The meta description can also be used by search engines on the search engine results pages (SERPsWhat you see when you perform a search on a search engine.).
A keyword refers to the word or words that are used in a search query on a search engine. Multiword keywords are sometimes referred to as key phrases.
The first step in SEO copywriting is keyword research. Having identified the themes of your Web site and Web pages, keyword research should be used to identify what keywords your target audience uses when searching for you.
Each page should be optimized for a primary key phrase and can be optimized for a secondary and tertiary key phrase as well. Usually a Web page is optimized for three key phrases but can be optimized for up to five (though only if the page is very long). Any more than that and you are better off creating new, niche Web pages.
In Chapter 6 "Search Engine Optimization", there is more detail on the process of keyword discovery and keyword selection.
The following are guidelines for using key phrases on a Web page:
Remember that each page on a Web site must have a unique URL (uniform resource locator), title, meta keywords, and meta description.
Each page on a Web site must have a unique URL, title, meta keywords, and meta description.
The main key phrase for the page should be used in the URL for the page. Often, the URL is generated from the page title, so using the key phrase in the page title should ensure that it is in the URL as well. This also helps readers to glance at the URL and get an idea what they are reading about.
The page title appears at the top of a user’s browser and should be able to tell the user (and the search engine spiders, of course) what the main theme of the page is. The page title is limited to sixty-six characters (including spaces). The key phrase should be used as close to the beginning of the title as possible—keeping it relevant and interesting.
The meta description is a short paragraph describing the page content. This summary is usually shown on the SERPs if it contains the search term searched for, which means that it needs to entice users to click through. The spiders use the meta description to deduce the topic of the page, and the use of targeted key phrases is important here. Copy is limited to no more than 166 characters (including spaces).
Keyword stuffing refers to putting too many keywords into the meta keywords’ tagging and using keywords that are not relevant to the Web page. Search engines can penalize this as a spam practice.
The meta keywords are a list of the words and phrases that are important on a Web page. The use of targeted key phrases is important here, but remember: no keyword stuffing. The meta keywords are limited to two hundred characters (including spaces). Take time to consider how to make this relevant as well as convincing enough to get a searcher to click on your page instead of your competitor’s.
Spiders assign more relevance to the text used in headings, so it is important to use your key phrases in the headings on your page. It also helps to structure your content.
Heading structures include the following:
<h1>Page heading. What the page content is about</h1>
<h2>Subheadings. “Chapters” of content breakdown</h2>
<h3>Information under the subheadings. Elaboration of main headings and more detail</h3>
Having a good heading hierarchy is important as spiders use it to move through your page. The hierarchy indicates what is more important and how the content is broken up. It also makes it easier for the reader to take in your content if it is arranged in a way that makes sense to her.
The number of times you use the key phrases is entirely dependent on how long the page of copy is. You want to optimize the page for the key phrases without their use being overt.
For SEO effectiveness, a page of Web copy should not be less than 250 words. On a 250-word page you could use the primary key phrase eight times (this includes use in metadata, headings, title, and body copy) and the secondary key phrase four times.
Why should you avoid requiring the user to scroll many times to read a page of content?
The average Web page should not be so long that the user needs to scroll and scroll to get to the end of it. If you find the page is getting exceptionally long, consider breaking it into different sections. This way you could add more pages of optimized copy focused on one theme, instead of one very long page. This also allows for you to optimize pages for more keywords, targeting various search queries.
The text used to link from one page to another is considered important by the search engine spiders, so try to ensure that your key phrase is used when linking to the optimized page. The anchor text of links should include the key phrase of the page being linked to and not the page being linked from.
Alt text refers to the “alt” attribute for the IMG HTML (image HTML element) tag: this is the text that appears in the caption. It is used in HTML to attribute a text field to an image on a Web page, normally with a descriptive function, telling a user what an image is about and displaying the text in instances where the image is unable to load. While this is handy for readers, we also do it for another reason: search engine spiders can’t read images, but they can read the alt text. The image title tag is what shows when you hover with your mouse over an image and can also be read by the search engine spider. It also appears on a page where images may have been blocked or take time to load.
Sometimes the World Wide Web is referred to as the “Wild Wild Web,” as it can seem to be an environment where anything goes. The ever-expanding numbers of social media participants play fast and loose with grammar.
With new services and products being developed daily, it can feel like the list of new words, and the new ways to use words, is building faster than you can keep up with it. Dictionaries and reference guides celebrate this regularly with a “word of the year,” usually one that has been in heavy use by the Internet audience for the three years preceding its entrance into a dictionary.
For example, in 2009, “unfriend” was voted the word of the year by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary, while “w00t” had its day in 2007 when it was featured on Merriam-Webster’s selection for word of the year.
Firefox is a free, open-source browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. As well as having improved and safer browsing, you can download extensions that let you customize your browser. You can download it for free from http://www.mozilla.org.
Online services can quickly become verbs in everyday language, so we talk of “googling something” instead of “searching on Google” and of “friending someone” on Facebook rather than “adding someone as a Facebook friend.”
Always remember to tailor your content to your target audience. If your content is aimed at cutting-edge early adopters, then litter it with the latest buzz words. If your audience does not know the difference between Firefox and Internet Explorer, then be cautious when using one of these new words.
Users dictate the direction and content of your copy. It’s up to you to make it worth the read!
The following is a brief list of the steps for writing online copy:
Even if you are a brilliant copywriter, the moment you stop sticking to online copy rules and regulations, your writing will hold very little weight on the search engine. These are some of the examples of bad practice that can have some very serious repercussions:
Rand Fishkin, The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, SEOmoz, February 25, 2006, http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization (accessed April 3, 2008).
