So you have paid for your shiny new website design and you reckon it’s looking great. But then you go and spoil it all by trying to write the copy yourself.

The most successful business sites and ecommerce sites are those that have been both designed and written by the professionals.

Bashing out the copy for your website really won’t work – and, indeed, poor copy will pretty much negate your beautifully designed site because to gain conversions you need people to look and READ about your service or products.

All the internet usage research shows that most potential clients are turned off by shoddy copy or poor grammar and content. Which means people will switch to another website that does it more accurately.

Here we bring you six reasons why you need to hire a professional copywriter for your website:

1.   If you write about your own content you may easily slip into the trap of writing about yourself – and not about the benefits of your company to potential clients. Instead, a professional copywriter will be experienced at assessing what your company does, why it is so great and making a considered list of all the benefits of the services or products that you offer. Remember they will have done all this before so they will be starting from an objective standpoint.

2. A copywriter will know to write about “we” and not about “you”. Using such language immediately makes clients feel that you are a professional  business.

3.   A copywriter will not fall into the trap of using your industry jargon. They will know that your service should be written so that every potential client understands what is being sold.  Using words that clients do not understand could easily alienate them.

4.  Are you sure about your grammar? Do you tend to mis-spell words? And what about apostrophes? It’s been shown time and again that websites with sloppy copy or errors are an immediate turn off for a large part of the population. Let the professional get it right for you.

5.  Do you waffle on and used 20 words when six will do? A copywriter knows how to write effective and engaging copy. They will utilise short paragraphs, bullet points, headers and selective bolding; all the things that make reading a website so much easier. (Note that reading from a screen is different from reading the printed page. People will scan the content of your website so you need to ensure that relevant words and phrases will be written correctly.)

6. Do you forget – or can’t find the time – to regularly update you website? It’s important that keep your website current and that you add new content. You could hire a copywriter on a small monthly retainer to keep tabs on your content and update a blog for you.

Ask your web design company for a trusted copywriter.

Think human and think software. These days, more than ever, to hit the dizzy heights of search engine rankings you need to write good copy for both the reader and the search engine spiders.

In the first place, the content of your website must read well for the user. It must be interesting, authoritative, entertaining and creative to gain maximum conversions. But a clever writer will also pay a lot of attention to getting the copy right in titles, headings, tags, intra-site links and external links.

Titles
These are very important and usually the first thing read by both real and virtual visitors. A title must contain keyword targets at the individual word level while attracting interest in potential readers as a whole phrase too. Never, ever leave your page “untitled”. And never, ever waste valuable space by making your company name the title of every page.

Keywords that are relevant to the page should be part of every page’s title:

Heading tags
These define the headings and subheadings of your article to both readers and search engine spiders. By default they appear larger than normal text and are bolded. While they are not a magic ranking bullet, they are looked at with more importance than average text and are an opportunity to show spiders the themes of your content and what keywords you wish to rank for.

The H1 tag
This is the main heading of your article and is the most important, rather like a headline in a newspaper. It should state clearly what the article is about and include the main for SEO.

H2 tags
An H2 tag defines subtopics. Again make it descriptive and useful with keywords included.

H3 tags
These act as sub-sub headings where necessary.

One topic per page
Keep content simple by sticking to one topic per page where possible. This doesn’t only make sense for ease of reading but also works best for search engine “crawlers”  that have algorithms that tend to work best on one concept at a time. Also, limiting the writing to one topic at a time helps with the task of placing keywords in 
the meta descriptions, page title, body copy, tags and links.

Write, write, write
Search engines and people love new information so consistently update your website with fresh content and they will visit more often.