In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.) Read the rest of this entry »

I know it’s not a good idea to check my company’s Google Analytics web stats every day, but I can’t help myself. I’m forever curious about who’s coming to the site, from where, and what they are looking at. When we generate a new company promotion I like to see the corresponding spikes in site traffic.

For us, the good news is that our traffic has doubled since we launched our updated site last January. Visitors are staying longer and viewing more of our work. Statistics show they are most interested in who we are, whom we work for and what services we provide, pretty much in that order. All in all, we’re happy with the site. And yet… Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re launching a new website, chances are you’ve made sure you’ve got the design and programming locked down. You know your site—your baby—needs to look better than your rudimentary web design skills will allow, and you’re the first to admit you know nothing about even the basics of programming, so you’re happy to farm those out. But the writing? Ah, the writing. Now that’s something you know how to do—and how hard can it be, really?

There’s the rub. And here are a few misconceptions people have about writing website copy.

1. If you can write well (or you’re in marketing), you can write web copy. Well, yes and no. A doctor can probably do a self-appendectomy if necessary, and a stylist can cut her own hair. But better to let someone else do it for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s hard to get the “angle” just right. And secondly, web copywriting is a special kind of writing. Sure, if you can write, you can learn to write websites and do it well. But you may not want to make yours or your company’s website your first try—at least not without some help.
2. It’s like writing a paper or an article. If you take this approach you may fall into what I call sequentialism, that is, the tendency to want each page to be a continuation of another, “previous” page. But if you take off your writer’s cap and put on your surfing-the-web-at-lunchtime cap, you’ll realize why this doesn’t make any sense. No one reads web pages in the order you think they should. There’s not even any guarantee that web users will enter your site via your home page, although you hope they will (that’s why you’ll make an extra effort to design and write your home page as carefully as you decorate your home’s entryway–because that’s probably the first thing people will see and it represents you).
3. Or, conversely, it’s like writing a bunch of one-page ads. If you write your web copy this way, you avoid the error of sequentialism but can instead fall into the trap of providing no connectedness between pages. When you write website copy, it’s important to keep in mind the overall structure of your website, the pages and subpages that are related to each other by subject, with major points and subpoints called out from page to page–and links between them to lead the reader where he wants to go.
4. Because there is so little copy on a page, it should be easy to crank out in no time. Anyone who writes regularly knows how easy it is to spend hours, nay days, reworking a single paragraph to get it just right. But because web copy can appear to be so much marketing “fluff” to outsiders, it looks easier to write than it is. With web copywriting, just as in any other kind of writing, every word counts. And you should make sure you allot a fair amount of time to the process, taking into account time for research, consulting with your web designer and programmer, and meetings with supervisors and others who have an investment in the final result.
5. I want my website to appeal to intellectuals or experts in the field, so I need to make my copy sufficiently lofty. With this approach, writers can fall into the trap of wordiness, jargon and excess, both in length of copy and in word choice. Web writers need to keep in mind that even the most expert of their site visitors will appreciate well-written, tight copy arranged in digestible chunks through the judicious use of subheads, bullet points and helpful links.
6. I need to cover the page topic thoroughly. This is a tough one. Unless your site is strictly informative, its goal is usually not to have site visitors read every last word of your copy—it’s to get them to do something else, whether that’s to buy a product, sign up for your company newsletter or call you to schedule a service or consultation. The key is to give people enough information to understand what you have to offer without boring them and sending them clicking frantically to get to a competitor’s site that can give them what they want quicker and without all the fuss. I received a wake-up call on this topic when a coworker (who shall remain unnamed) said to me when looking over my home page copy for a client site said, “But who’s going to read all this stuff?” Point taken. I don’t think I ever made that mistake again, and for that I am grateful to the coworker.
7. My cleverly written web copy will be my claim to fame. Don’t we wish. Maybe some of us will get an award for our copywriting excellence. But if we fall in love with our own writing such that we can’t edit it down, or if the “voice” the site copy speaks in is ours instead of the voice needed to speak to site visitors, our web copy will ring false and fail to connect with potential customers.

One helpful resource we’ve used here at Hile is the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Although it’s a book about web usability and not specifically about copywriting, there’s so much helpful information in here, everyone who has anything to do with creating websites should read it. And, more specifically for writers, it can never hurt to take another (or first) look at Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. You can buy it on Amazon or just about anywhere, or you can save yourself some money and access it online.

Still want to write your own web copy? Go for it. Need a little help? Let us know. Hile provides a variety of copywriting services to meet your web writing needs, from consulting on your copy, to proofreading and light editing, to writing all of the copy for your site.