The Yorkshire Good Web Copywriting Guide

Introduction

The aim of the Yorkshire web copywriting guide is to provide practical tips and information for non-professionals wishing to write copy for a website or for any web copywriters seeking to improve their technique.

1. Times Change

As a society we have come to rely on the internet in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Whether it be for banking, communicating with loved ones, keeping abreast of current affairs, booking holidays or appointments with the doctor, we now depend on the web to help us to achieve our objectives quickly and effectively.

Our heavy dependency on PCs, laptops, mobile phones and other internet-enabled hardware has inevitably impacted on how we read and write. It has also begun to influence language itself.

2. Walk The Line

Rules which we have long learned to apply to the way we write often go out the window when it comes to writing for the web. The main reason for this is that people read text differently from a screen than they do when it is presented in a book or a magazine.

For reasons that scientists still don’t fully understand, reading and understanding text on a screen is significantly more taxing on our brains than doing so from printed matter. The process is considerably more tiring, and we tend to find what we are reading less absorbing and more difficult to understand.

And, because of the extra effort required, we are many times more likely to skim read than we otherwise would.

Have you ever written something directly on your computer that you’ve believed to be free of errors until you print it out and checked it through? It’s amazing how many glaringly obvious mistakes you suddenly spot!

It just goes to show how much harder it is for us to read from a screen as accurately and with the same levels of concentration as we do from printed materials.

3. Easy On the Eye

As good web copywriters, it is our job to try to minimise the strain placed upon our readers. If we’re not careful about how we write and format our material then we’ll simply lose people’s attention. We should be mindful of how we present and paragraph our text and we words we use.

Good web copywriting professionals will always divide their text into short, manageable chunks broken up by sub-headings.

It’s a good idea to keep your sentences short as well.

4. Find the Right Words

It’s worth sitting down and having a good long think about who it is that you are trying to target with the text that you’re writing. It is impossible to choose an appropriate tone, style and vocabulary unless you know who you’re trying to engage with it.

Achieving the right tone and style will make a huge difference to the success of your website and is vitally important for attracting the right kind of search engine traffic.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Everyone’s talking about SEO these days and all sorts of theories abound about how to best attract search engines to your site. The reality is that if you write good quality copy that is well labeled and genuinely useful to the market for which you intend it, then you will be doing exactly what the search engines like best anyway.

There is an awful lot of back-to-front thinking going on with web copywriters writing for search engines rather than for their potential customers. They are losing sight of the fact that the search engines’ primary objective is to provide searchers with the most relevant website for their particular search.

Therefore, by getting into the mind of your customers, you’ll also find that you do well in the search engines by default!

6. Walk In Their Shoes

Try to establish exactly what your target audience would type into a search engine if they were looking for your type of product or service. Ask friends, colleagues and customers and then start to compile a list of these ‘keyphrases’.

Don’t be afraid to include longer or more specific keyphrases eg. ‘tenpin bowling alley in LS6 with children’s play area’ rather than short basic keyphrases like ‘bowling alley’.

You’ll find that these ‘long-tail’ phrases are the ones which will actually bring you the most customers ultimately.

Why? Well firstly, the more specific your keyphrase, the lower the levels of competition for it.

Have a look at the figure below which shows how many results Google returned for each search phrase:

Figure 1
Bowling alley - 2,240,000
Bowling alley in Leeds - 150,000
Tenpin bowling alley in Leeds - 63,700
Tenpin bowling alley in South Leeds - 45,600
Tenpin bowling alley in South Leeds with children’s play area - 11,300
Tenpin bowling alley in LS6 with children’s play area – 15

It’s amazing how you can narrow down the competition isn’t it?

Secondly, if people are typing in a very specific search term then the chances are that they know exactly what they want and will be genuinely interested in buying your product or service when they find your website.

Once you have compiled a good list of likely search terms you can start to plan your copy around them.

7. How to Keyphrase Your Copy

Choose one keyphrase for the copy of each page and try to weave it into the body copy a couple of times - we always advise our copywriters to aim for between 150 and 300 words in total for each page. You also need to make sure that the individual words which make up the keyphrase - the ‘keywords’ - are featured elsewhere in your copy – this should happen more or less naturally anyway.

Don’t forget to use good clear keyphrased headers and sub-headers to aid the flow!

Remember that if you can’t fit in your keyphrases without making the text really awkward then think again about whether you’ve really picked the most relevant term for the page. Every good web copywriting professional knows that rendering their copy lumpy or unnatural by squeezing in keyphrases is a big no no.

It’s far better to go back to the drawing board and choose a more appropriate phrase or to try the little workaround that we cover in section 11.

Remember to use good plain English too!

8. Keywords and keyphrases

You’ll hear both of these terms being bandied around in internet marketing circles – sometimes interchangeably – but we’ll take a minute to set you straight on what they mean.

Keywords are the individual words which relate to your market or product. If we use the bowling example again then some of the obvious keywords would be ‘bowling’ ‘tenpin’ ‘alley’ ‘Leeds’. These words will more or less naturally occur in the text that you write if you’re keeping things nice and relevant – although it is good to make a list to refer to so you can check that you’re using as many appropriate words as possible.

Keyphrases in comparison are the longer search phrases that people are likely to type into search engines to find your products and services eg. ‘discount tenpin bowling vouchers’ ‘tenpin bowling alley near Selby’ ‘professional tenpin bowling leagues in Leeds’ and are compound phrases made up of various keywords.

These you need to carefully plan and weave into your text to make certain that people who are searching for services that you offer can find you.

9. Regular Spring Cleaning

If you can access the statistics for the website you’re writing for – try Google analytics which is free - you will be able to view information on which keyphrases are bringing people to the website. This will give you a valuable insight into which keyphrases are working well and which ones aren’t playing ball.

You can use this information to help you to experiment with the wording in the website to help you to find your target audience.

10. Keyword Saturation

There is a slight tendency towards obsession among web copywriting professionals about the ideal percentage of keyword saturation in any given piece of text. The general consensus is that between 6 and 10% works best.

It’s probably better to concentrate on writing good relevant text that will keep your target audience engaged though than worrying about calculating average keyphrase ratios. As you become a better web copywriter you will start to find it easier to include more keywords in your work anyway.

And do be careful about using too many keywords! The penalties for ‘keyword stuffing’ are pretty severe. You could even end up having the website you’re working on banned completely from the search results.

The search engines have sophisticated checking systems in place to make sure that web copywriters don’t just fill pages with keywords in the hope of getting high search rankings you see.

Remember they want to provide searchers with good quality information just like you do!

11. Flexible Friends

If you’re finding it difficult to work your chosen keyphrases into your text – and we all do from time to time – then it’s worth remembering this popular little web copywriting workaround.

When a search engine reads the copy on a web page it doesn’t read the standard punctuation marks or line breaks. Yes! Your text will appear to be totally devoid of full stops, semi-colons, hyphens, commas to its computerised eye and this offers you a nice little bit of extra flexibility.

For example, if the keyphrase you wanted to use was "bowling alleys with a children’s play area South Leeds", you might find it difficult to make this fit naturally into your text. If, however, you use some punctuation to work around the problem, you can easily incorporate the keyphrase without compromising on readability.

“We are proud to be one of the only Yorkshire-based bowling alleys with a children’s play area. South Leeds is easy to reach from the city centre . . .”

Wasn’t that easy?

12. Narrow Down the Competition

As well as trying to narrow down the competition by including geographical words in your keyphrases – see figure 1 – you need to try to think of other ways to make your website stand out to your customers.

What are the unique features of the service that you are describing? Are there any special offers, child-friendly products, dog-friendly products, party packages, free trials, award-winning services, or competitions? Are you organic or fair trade? Do you specialise in hen parties or offer disabled access?

If you want to get customers to your website then you need to identify these unique selling points and build your keyphrases around them.

You’re very unlikely to get to the top of Google for a general term like ‘bowling’ or ‘health food’ as there are just too many other websites out there. You might for ‘tenpin bowling alley in LS6 with children’s play area’ though!

13. Keyword Your Link Text

As web copywriters we often use link text to refer our readers from one page to another outside of the normal navigation of a website. It’s a good way to promote sales, enable users to find things fast and hide bulky additional information.

As with headers, it is a good idea to include keywords in the link text. This can have a positive impact with search engine results and can act as a further lure to your readers. If you imagine ‘click here’ in contrast with ‘view our Christmas and New Year cottage breaks’ then you’ll see what we mean.

People will be searching for ‘Christmas and New Year cottage breaks’ whereas you can bet your boots they’re not searching for ‘click here’ when they’re planning a festive getaway!

14. Spelling Salts

Yes, bad spelling is one of the cardinal sins of good copywriting! So why are we telling you to do it? Well, it can sometimes have its place in web copywriting believe it or not.

If the product or service you’re writing about involves very commonly misspelled words like ‘jewellery’ for example then you need to be aware that a high proportion of your potential customers will be typing ‘jewelary’ ‘jewelry’ ‘jewellry’ into Google. It might be an idea to include some of these words in order to help these searchers to find your website.

If you do decide to include some spelling mistakes to cater for the misspellers among your target group, then be wary about where you include them. It is a good idea to tuck them away in a sub-page or somewhere they can’t offend people!

15. Plain Sailing

Finally, our web copywriting team has compiled this list of helpful hints to help you keep your writing punchy and straightforward.

Ditch the jargon (this depends on who you’re writing for admittedly)
Keep it relevant
Use short sentences
Break up your text with sub-headers
Avoid the passive voice – just be direct
Include regular short call to actions – ‘book now’ ‘buy now’ ‘get quote’
Use bullet points if you’ve got lots to say so you don’t bore people

Bon Voyage x