There’s a little tea shop in a village in Somerset. It has blue cracked and peeling walls and a warm wooden stable door. A sign saying “freshly baked” hangs at a slant from one of the small country-style windows, but it’s the sight beyond the window, beyond the sign, that stills my steps. The most glorious triple-layer carrot cake I’ve ever seen towers over perfectly baked and decorated cakes of various colours and flavours: chocolate and vanilla, coffee and walnut, lavender, and of course, a Victoria sponge jewelled with perfectly formed ruby-red strawberries.
I hadn’t really wanted cake, not until my eyes landed on that shop front, but now… now it’s no longer a matter of want. I need cake. I deserve it.
That is the effect your website copy should have on your target audience.
If your website is your store window display, then your copy is the delicious multi-layered carrot cake enticing visitors in: “Come,” it says. “Sit in the warmth with a nice pot of tea and a perfect slice of cake. Because nothing in the world will satisfy your hunger the way our product or service can.”
Of course, your website copy does more than compel visitors to book, or buy, or call. A good copywriter will take into account your online visibility (SEO). You’ll need to use the right keywords in the right places, and you’ll need to do it without compromising the overall appeal of your messaging. After all, if the right people don’t ever come across your website, what’s the point of having one?
I realise some of you may not like cake, (though I guarantee you just haven’t found the right cake for you, yet) but stick with me for a moment longer. Nobody’s going to stop walking, or scrolling, if the cake you have to offer appears bland. It may be the most delicious thing ever baked, but who’s going to know?
Let me put it another way. On a street with ten other cake shops, each offering weird and wonderful specimens, if your offering doesn’t stand out, you’ll lose customers.
So, what is website copywriting about? Is it just stringing a bunch of words together in an appealing way? Not really, even AI can try to do that. Copywriting is about human psychology. It’s understanding the needs of your customers, their pains and worries, their worst fears, their deepest desires, and crafting a message for them that is uniquely on brand and uniquely compelling. AI can’t do that, and—unless you’ve got Karate Kid Danny catching a fly using a pair of chopsticks-style luck—an inexperienced copywriter can’t either.
Website copywriting is about getting the right message on your virtual shop window. It’s about choosing the right keywords and placing them in the right places, using headings and subheadings, and breaking up your content in a way that’s enticing to readers and attractive to search engines. Website copywriting is the art of telling your brand’s story in your brand’s voice.
Here’s a question every website owner should ask themselves:
If you were to strip your website of all its bells and whistles, including your fancy images, graphics, and colours, so that all you were left with were words…
Would your copy alone be enough to entice customers? Because it should be.
Because that collection of amazing cakes would equally have stopped me in my tracks had they been laid out on a plain market stall.
So, tell me about your virtual shop window. Is it doing your product, your service, and your brand justice?
Be it an about page, a homepage, service pages, or the whole shebang, if you feel like your website copy is not quite on point, I’d love to hear about it. I enjoy working closely with business owners to craft unique copy for their websites that they can feel proud of.
Interested? Schedule a free consultation today, and let’s get baking!