Who Should Write Your Website?

Maybe you’ve listened to thousands of online adverts and invested in a Squarespace website. Or maybe you’ve gone the whole hog and asked a web design agency to create a bespoke site for your business. Either way, you’ve just been faced with an important question: who’s going to write your website?

You’re not the first person to be faced with this quandary. You’d be surprised by how many businesses haven’t considered where they’ll source the written content for their new site. Put on the spot, and with the clock ticking down to launch day, you’re faced with a conundrum made of blank word documents and white spaces. Who do you approach to write your business website?

You probably already have a few ideas rattling around your head. So let’s go through them.

1) I’ll Ask My Designer?

You could. But nine times out of ten, you shouldn’t.

I’ve worked with loads of designers. Some have been brilliant. Some have been less-than-brilliant. One claimed that licorice tea was an edible drink. And another designed this lovely website that you’re reading now.

Not one of them, not a single one, could write compelling sales copy.

You need a hell of a lot of talent to be a good website designer. You need to know how colours can influence emotions, how elements of a design fit together (in a variety of ways if they’re designing a responsive website), and where things need to be positioned to grab a customer’s attention. They do a tough job, and they do it brilliantly.

But they don’t know how to create a need for your services using a handful of words. How tweaking one sentence can lead visitors to your site to the contact forms, and how choosing the correct call to action can increase your conversion rate tenfold. It’s just not in their toolbox.

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find that one-in-a-thousand designer who’s also a great writer, but the odds are against you. And your designer knows that.

If you ask your designer to write your website, chances are they’ll bow out gracefully. But maybe they’ll recommend someone who can do a better job?

2) Can I Re-use My Brochure Copy?

This isn’t a terrible idea. But unfortunately, it still isn’t a great one.

Audience is a huge consideration for any piece of marketing copy, and it’s likely that your website will be aimed at a very similar audience to your printed materials. But audience isn’t the be-all and end-all of compelling writing.

You also need to consider the medium.

A brochure needs to interact with your customers in a different way. Because space is limited, your words need to be chosen in a very careful way, funneling and driving your readers towards their phones. Because while you can’t answer all of their questions in a four page booklet, you can answer everything in a phone call.

The internet is different. You have nearly infinite scope to add pages and content, providing more and more information to help clients make an informed purchasing decision. But this content is put together in a precise way, leading customers through your website with a carefully considered sitemap, and the correct use of links, to make sure nobody gets lost.

And that’s before we fall down the rabbit hole of SEO copywriting and appealing to the search engines.

If you want to use your brochure copy, it’s because that copy’s working for your business. So instead of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole, go back to the person who created your brochure copy in the first place.

If they’re as good at digital copywriting as they are with print, you could be on to a winner.

3) I’ll Just Steal from the Competition?

During my time working alongside and as part of website design departments, you’d be amazed at how many times I heard project managers faced with the suggestion that they “take what the competition says, and change the names.”

This isn’t a good plan. Straight up, it’s an admission that you have no unique selling points. No point of difference from your competition. That, when it comes down to it, there’s absolutely no reason to choose you over that other company who does exactly the same thing that you do.

 

There’s a reason broadly similar products spend thousands or millions of pounds differentiating themselves from their competitors. It’s because not standing out is the easiest way of dooming your business to irrelevance.

There’s also a special consideration when it comes to your website. The issue of duplicate content.

One caveat before we start – there is no “duplicate content penalty.” Google won’t dump your whole site from the search engines because some of your content has been used elsewhere. It’ll just ignore the duplicate content. You’d be amazed that some “professional SEOs” still don’t get that.

But even though there’s no penalty to worry about, duplicating content you’ve found elsewhere isn’t a good idea. Search engines don’t want to show users the exact same content over and over, so they’ll ignore any sites repeating content that they already rank.

If you don’t want to stand out from the competition, and you’re not bothered about customers finding your website on the search engines, by all means steal your competitor’s content. But if you want a site that delivers, you’ll need to consider having something unique written just for you.

4) Erm… My Nephew’s Got an English GCSE?

And my goddaughter has a pair of scissors.

I still go to a professional when it’s time to get a haircut.

5) Ah. You Want Me to Spend Thousands on a Copywriter.

Hold your horses. I didn’t use the word “thousands.” In fact, even away from the churn-and-burn crap put out by the content mills, good copy doesn’t need to cost thousands.

But, yes. I do recommend hiring a digital copywriter to write your website. And not just because I’m a copywriter myself.

By hiring a copywriter, you’re getting:

• unique content – a better chance to rank on the search engines
• content that emphasises your points of difference – a better chance of standing out from the crowd
• professional copy that’s focused on sales – a better chance of turning readers into customers

If you don’t want to stand out, rank or sell, then you can ignore this blog post. But if you want to make a success of your company’s online activities, you need to invest. Find a good, trustworthy copywriter with a portfolio that you like, and ask for a quote.

I’m sure you’ll be surprised at just how effective (and cost-effective) choosing a professional to write your website will be.

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