Before You Hire a Website Copywriter…
You Say You Want Web Content Writing
When you’re doing business online, it’s essential that your written content is fresh, compelling, and written specifically for your target audience. Good website copywriting can make or break a website. It can turn a casual visitor into a loyal customer or convince a shopper to buy.
Hiring a professional to do your website copywriting is a pretty good idea but what if copywriting is not the service you really need?
Tell Me What You Really Want
I get requests from clients all the time for website copywriting projects that aren’t copywriting projects at all. Here are a few examples:
- How much will it cost for you to rewrite my home page? I need to get more traffic to my site.
- I’d like to get a press release published on several major media sites. How much will that cost?
- People who visit my site aren’t buying my product. Can you review my site and give me a quote to rewrite all of it?
Before you hire a website copywriter, you need to do one simple thing: identify your primary objective.
Now, Let’s Figure Out What You Need
In the examples above, written content was not necessarily part of the business owners’ true goal. Let’s take a closer look at each request.
How much will it cost for you to rewrite my home page? I need to get more traffic to my site.
You don’t want a new home page; you want more traffic. A freshly written home page might help you get more traffic, but this request has more to do with online marketing and search engine optimization than it does with website copywriting.
To draw traffic, you usually need to do one of three things. First you can pay for advertising or use search engine marketing (SEM). Second, you can find ways to get links to your site from other sites. Finally, you can optimize your site so it draws people who are looking for your product or service using search engines. This is called search engine optimization (SEO).
Note that search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) are two different things.
SEO in particular is closely linked to website copywriting because the copywriter must use keywords in the composition of the text. However, SEO is its own field of study, and I’ll talk more about what SEO is and how it can help you get more traffic in an upcoming post.
I’d like to get a press release published on several major media sites. How much will that cost?
Every time I get this request, my first question is always, “What’s the news?” And the answer is almost always “We want to tell people about our site.”
A press release is a news item and is usually a time-sensitive announcement. If your website sells eyewear, then a press release probably isn’t right for you unless your sunglasses allow people to travel through time or your spectacles give a wearer the ability to fly. That’s news!
You can create news, of course, and then a press release will be entirely appropriate. Running a major promotion or special could be newsworthy. A new product or website launch may also be newsworthy.
Interestingly, this request isn’t really for a press release. Like the first request, what this client actually wants is more traffic. There are a lots of ways to get traffic and a press release is only one of them.
People who visit my site aren’t buying my product. Can you review my site and give me a quote to rewrite all of it?
The real question being asked is this: why aren’t people buying my product?
It may have nothing to do with the written content and everything to do with the type of traffic the site is attracting. Or, maybe it’s not so much that people aren’t buying – they just haven’t found the site at all.
What you want to know is:
- How many visitors are coming to the site?
- Who is visiting the site? Where are they coming from?
- Why aren’t they responding to the call to action?
When people aren’t buying your product or hiring you, the first thing you ned to do is check your traffic statistics to see how many people have stopped by. Your stats should tell you how long they stay on your site and which pages they read during their stay.
Next, you want to know the source of the visitors. Are they coming in through links? Social media? Search engines? Maybe the traffic you’re getting isn’t your target customer base.
For example, let’s say you’re a florist named Kate Tomlin and you grow your own lilies, so that’s the flower you feature most on your site. Due to the combination of the words “lily” and “Tomlin,” you often get search traffic for “Lily Tomlin.” In fact, you get a lot of it.
Rewriting your home page is not going to make these visitors buy your lilies because they’re not looking for flowers, they’re looking for the actress Lily Tomlin.
When Website Copywriting is Appropriate
A really good website copywriter should be able to tell you if you’re ready for copywriting services and many web content writers provide SEO copywriting and a host of services that are designed to help you get more traffic or increase sales.
At least, that’s what I do.
About Melissa Donovan
There will be times that every site owner and business owner will have to hire web content writers. And this should not come as a surprise since writers can do a lot of work for the business and can save you on time. That instead of you who will do the work of producing and submitting these contents, the writer will be the one who will do the job. Simply put, you get to increase site profitability and reach with your partnership with these writers. A lot of business owners and site owners know these things now and these are the reasons why they post writing jobs. Your content comes in as a handy guide on how to properly select writers.
Web content writers also know their field – their writing is polished and they also have a firm understanding of how to write specifically for an online audience, and how to communicate with the target customers. People often don’t realize how many skills are required to produce well-written web content.