When it’s good you can’t read just one.
Do you spend your days chatting about web copy? Obsessed about landing page copy? Consumed with A/B testing? Well, if you’re thinking that writing web copy doesn’t make your mouth water – it should! If you’re in business today, you need to know about landing page copy and how to make it appetizing to read for your customers and for search engines. Not heeding simple rules can cost you! So, here is my cheat sheet for writing web copy search engines and humans alike will want to gobble up and go for seconds.
Headings: 8 words or less1
The landing page heading is the first thing readers see, so make these 8 words (or fewer) really count. Use keywords that are important to your business. Do not use adjectives or prepositions (and, a, the, of).1
Sentences: 15 – 20 words1
This is not a good time to show how many big words you know. Use short words, short sentences and verbs to catapult your readers to action. Select a few keyword phrases and write your sentences around those.
Paragraphs: about 3 sentences
If you need more than 3 sentences to express your topic then you need to narrow your focus.
Page word count: 250 to 300 words
Gone are the days of stuffing your page full of keywords to capture a search engines attention. So write what you need to write, and then say no more.
The Customer
Be honest to the customer. People will find out if you really aren’t the cheapest or best in town. Everything you write should be for the customer; don’t say you’ve lowered prices up to 20%, tell them “Your Grocery List – for up to 20% Less” (similar to a recent billboard I saw). It’s never about what you have to offer, it’s about what your customer will get out of it – what pain you will fix, how their life will improve, or what increased pleasure they will have.
Effective Web Writing may be “short” but it still needs to be good writing. Create crisp bite-sized web copy and no one will read just one.
Resources
June 28th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Great advice, but my question is this: if I don’t use lots of keywords for search engines to find, how will the search engines know to steer them to my site for all these eclectic items I have in inventory?
I’m just about to re-design my website and am still figuring out the best way to keep viewers AND attract search engines.
Thanks so much!
June 28th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Well written.
July 1st, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Thanks, Louie!
Celeste, good question. There are lots of answers to this question but from my perspective it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. Relevance is what matters – even for search engines. So find the most important keywords – that fit with your service/business and target those. Different keywords, different landing pages. If you’re trying to fit too many things – keywords – on a page then you probably need to narrow your focus for that page. Also, you can get in more keywords in ways that aren’t so visible to the viewer – like using keywords your image alt tags. Hmmm, I thnk I’ll put keyword relevance on my Copy Chat article list. Thanks for the question.
July 17th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
great tips. I will be returning when I am read to write another landing page.