Writing the copy (words) for your website can be quite challenging. You need to be clear on your marketing strategy, market segments, points of differentiation, key messages etc before you start to write.
Here is a website writing checklist
- Decide on the purpose of your website
- Choose the market segments that you will be communicating with (i.e by looking at your marketing plan)
- Decide on the geographical footprint (local, regional, national, multi-country, global?)
- Write a list of all of the products / services that you sell
- Ask your customers what they would like to see, within your website
- Gather testimonial statements together and, ideally, get some new ones
- Think carefully about the main navigation bar, i.e. Home About Services Blog Contact (etc)
- Seven navigation bar items is fine; nine is the upper limit
- Ensure that you are well supplied with coffee, tea and biscuits
- Select the keywords and keyword phrases that you will be using
- Write the draft copy for the homepage quickly and set this to one side
- Now write the copy for the main ‘nav bar’ pages
- Refer back to the homepage copy (it will probably need changing)
- Write a batch of blogs for the new website
- Take a short holiday
- Incorporate calls to action throughout the webcopy
- Edit the words
- Edit them again
- Get someone else to read through it all
- Proof-read the webcopy
- Upload it to your website
- Use anchor text links to join everything up
- Lie down in a darkened room: you deserve it
- Study your website stats to see what people are actually reading
- Use this information + customer feedback to improve your webcopy
- Take a much longer holiday than you did at step 15
Alternatively…
Are you launching a new website or looking to revitalise your current site? I offer a website writing service with a difference. It combines over three decades of copywriting experience with my marketing consultancy knowledge (3000+ clients). If you would like to spend a day or two writing your website words with me, by all means get in touch. By the way, I never take holidays.
