Websites need copywriting – nothing as complicated as a sales letter but still words!

Because of the way Google works, there’s rarely a single entry page for your website.

How many times have you clicked a Wikipedia link on the search results? And how many times have you seen their main index page?

If you’re like most people, the answer to that second question is rarely if ever.

The same logic applies to your site.

Every single page is potentially the first page people will see.

Make the title look good

Titles are always important.

In that respect, every single page of your website is a sales letter.

You’re “selling” the searcher on the idea that they need to click through to your page because it’s the most relevant one for their particular search.

That’s why Google sometimes changes your page titles in the results – they think the one that their computer has worked out is better than the one you’ve written.

Take the time to make sure that your page titles are as good as you can make them – they need to include your chosen keywords but they need to be written in such a way that searchers react positively to them and click through to your site.

Page content

Once people have clicked through to your website, you need to deliver on the promise you’ve made in the page title.

You can’t bait and switch.

Because if you do that, you’ll just push people to press the back button or close the tab that contains your web page.

So your page content needs to immediately convey the point that you’re going to answer whatever it was you promised in the page title.

Large sites like Forbes can kind-of get away with adding extra rubbish onto their pages. Personally, I find the forced advert on their site irritating and about half the time I’ll click the back button and find a different site that offers the same (or similar) content.

My guess is that I’m not alone in that point of view – the fact that they offer a “click here to skip this ad” link tells me that – but if you’re a smaller site and put that kind of barrier up between people arriving at your site and viewing the content, you’re asking for trouble.

The same logic goes for popups.

I use them on a handful of my affiliate sites but more for testing purposes than anything else.

The easier you make it for people to reach your content, the more likely they are to stay and read it.

Which brings us back to copywriting.

Short headings often work well.

Like that one.

They allow people to skim the content of your page and home in on the section that’s of most interest to them at this point in time.

Even though I recommend writing 500 or more words per post on your site, that doesn’t mean that anyone other than Google’s robots will read all of it.

It’s difficult to get stats on how much of a page people read – browsers and computers don’t send that information back to your server.

And you can’t tell from your server stats. I’ll often leave tabs open in my browser with the intention of going back to a particular page but whether or not that ever happens is another matter entirely.

The only thing you can do is make sure that your page looks and reads as well as it can.

So breaking it up with sub headings, bullet points, images and videos is always a good idea.

Read it out loud

Any page that is likely to be critical to your site – maybe because it has a keyword you’re especially focused on, maybe another reason – is worth reading out loud.

Most of us read words “out loud” inside our heads.

The process of reading your website pages out loud formalises that process.

I do it for any major sales letter I write and any important page on my sites.

It highlights the places where you’ve got it wrong.

If you stumble when you do this, that sentence needs to be changed.

If you skip words or change their order, you at least need to think about changing them on screen as well.

It doesn’t take long and you’ll probably only do it once for any particular page. Although ideally you should re-visit long serving pages every now and then to make sure that they’re still in tune with your current offerings.

If you need more help with your website copywriting, check out my fast article writing product.

And if you need help with writing sales letters, click here.