Copywriting

There's much more to a winning website than a smooth, clean, efficient design. It has a key partner, which is neglected at its peril – would Holmes have been successful without Watson, or Tom without Jerry? Imagine a table without legs, or beans without toast. It just doesn' t work

The website's only job is to deliver a set of messages effectively to its visitors – a superb postman delivering the mail. The graphic content and feel of a site both carry important meanings, but the copy does the big sell. It persuades a visitor to be what you need – such as a purchaser, a member, or a follower of your brand.

Sadly, there's a lot of junk copy online – a place where people generally like reading even less than they do with print media. Inappropriate expressions and spellings (message: we can't be a**ed), over-long, boring content, and a lack of helpful detail when it is needed – people who visit don't find what they want. Two things then might happen: they move on to the next page in a list of sometimes many thousands (your competitors); or they never return, or even bad-mouth you to others.

Good web copy is written according to the medium's special rules. It allows visitors find exactly the words they're looking for, and quickly. The right words for the job vary enormously from sector to sector, of course; visitors to financial services sites have very different expectations from those entering creative media zones. The words used must suit the visitors likely to be dropping in, anticipate their needs, and meet them. Or else they're ex-visitors.

And if humans are finding it hard to spot the keywords they're looking for, search engines will also be struggling. Dropping down the Google charts becomes inevitable. On its own, that means fewer hits. The visitors who do manage to find the site will yield a low proportion of conversions. It goes further – if the copy is not refreshed or added to regularly, then it slips further down the searches. This depressing downward spiral resists all the valiant/expensive attempts at optimisation in every other way bar one – attending to the copy.