Giving your website copy a summer glow up is the perfect way to keep your website fresh, up to date and interesting for your users.
As content writers, we often find that clients, once their website copy is written, leave it as it is for far too long. While it may have been fit for purpose at the time, things change very quickly in the online world, and it’s vital that regular updates happen to ensure your website still stands out from the crowd.
Here at The Edwards Company, we’ve developed the perfect summer glow up plan for your content. From ensuring you’re implementing the correct SEO techniques to understanding how to delight your audience, our tips and tricks are designed to give your website copy the makeover it deserves.
The Purpose of Website Copy
As far as we’re concerned, the purpose of your website copy can be split into two groups:
- Delighting Search Engines
- Delighting Your Audience
Rather than focusing on one or the other, it’s important to have a good balance of both to ensure you’re hitting the mark from all angles. First, let’s take a look at some tips and tricks for delighting search engines.
Delighting Search Engines with your Website Copy
When we talk about delighting search engines, we’re referring to the act of implementing SEO tactics that will make your content show up on search engine results pages. If you aren’t ranking highly on search engines, your content will be difficult to find, no matter how well written it is. It’s therefore essential that you understand the tactics you can implement to ensure your website receives the exposure it deserves.
Keywords
When it comes to optimising for search engines, it’s best to start with keywords. Once you’ve undertaken research to discover the keywords you want to rank for, you’ll need to distribute these evenly throughout your text. Adding them into the body of the text or less obvious sections of your content, like the alt text on images or tags, is a great way to make sure search engines understand what you want to rank for.
However, it’s important to remember that if there is one thing search engines hate, it’s keyword stuffing. Don’t shove your keywords in here, there and everywhere. Instead, use them naturally and don’t feel pressured to add more than necessary – no good will come of it!
If you’re unsure of how many keywords is too many, try using a tool like Yoast when writing your content. Yoast lets you know when you’ve hit the perfect keyword density and will advise you if you go over this amount.
Meta Descriptions
Search engines are all about making things easy for users. They want to provide the best information in response to their query, and they want to do it in the simplest, quickest way possible.
This is why search engines love well-written meta descriptions so much. A meta description is the little bit of text that shows up under the headline of your website or page on a search results page. Its purpose is to give users a brief overview of what the page entails so they can make a quick decision as to whether that page contains what they need or not.
It’s vital that every page on your website has a meta description attached to it. Without it, search engines will be reluctant to include your content on results pages as it doesn’t make things easy for their users.
After you’ve created each page on your website, take some time to craft a short but sweet meta description (ensuring it meets character limits) for each, ensuring it clearly and succinctly describes what the page is about. If you can fit a keyword in there, even better!
Headlines
Using headlines in your website content gives search engines further clarification of the content of your page and allows them to categorise it accordingly. The more context they can get, the better!
Ensure you’re using headlines effectively. For example, for key sections, select a H1 headline. This gives search engines an overview of what the page is about. Using H2 and H3 for sub-sections adds to this and gives you a clear structure that search engines will determine as being useful and valuable to its users.
Again, using your keywords in your headlines (or keyword synonyms) helps reinforce what it is you’re trying to rank for, thus making it more likely that search engines will choose to showcase your content.
Optimising for search engines is a great way to ensure your website is receiving the exposure it needs to support the growth of your business. And the good news is, you don’t need to start from scratch! All these techniques can be added to existing website copy to give it the summer glow up it needs. (Other seasons work too!)
Delighting your Audience
The second and most important component of a successful copy is delighting your audience. While optimising for search engines is great, it won’t be search engines that eventually invest in your services or products.
This is why it’s important to remember that, amongst all the technical aspects of your website copy, you are writing for human beings first and foremost.
Delighting your audience is all about giving them what they want. Your website copy should address their pain points, wants and needs and offer simple, clear solutions to their problems. Every page should be of value to your audience and should work to engage them in some way.
To do this successfully, try giving some of these tips and tricks ago:
Research
Knowing your audience means researching your audience. Spend time consuming the content they consume, follow them on social media, understand how they converse and what they converse about. You can then tap into this when writing your website copy.
When a customer or potential customer is consuming your website copy, they should feel like you’re speaking directly to them. They should be able to relate to what it is that is written, and they should feel as if you understand their wants and needs perfectly. You won’t be able to do this without thorough audience research first.
Visuals
Delighting your audience involves delighting their eyes, as well as their minds! Visual content is a great way to break up website copy and works to make things easy and interesting for those consuming it. Often, your users won’t have time to read every single word on your website, but if you’ve used clever images and infographics to punctuate it, they’ll be able to understand the information a lot quicker.
Us humans have very short attention spans, so the quicker you provide information, the better. Remember, the aim of the game is to make understanding your content as easy as possible for your audience, which is why it’s important to think about the visual content you’re providing, as well as the written content.
Headlines
We spoke about headlines in regard to SEO, but they’re also vital when it comes to helping your audience understand your website copy.
As we’ve already established, our attention spans are short (and getting shorter still!). Headlines help to break up your website copy and ensure your audience can find the information they need as quickly as possible. Use headlines to direct your audience to the most important parts of the page to ensure they don’t miss what they’re looking for and end up clicking off to find it elsewhere.
Website pages that are well structured, clear and concise are far more effective in conveying your message and help your audience to have a valuable, stress-free experience on your website.
Again, as with our SEO techniques, these tips and tricks can be added to your existing content to give it the boost it needs. You’ll not only be delighting search engines and ensuring your content appears high up on the search engine results page, but you’ll also be optimising the experience of using your website for the best important factor of your business success: your audience.
Website Summer Glow Ups with The Edwards Company
Here at The Edwards Company, we’re offering summer glow ups for your website copy. We’ll audit your current copy before making impactful changes to ensure your website copy is having the maximum effect when it comes to the success of your business.
Our content writers will work with you to ensure your website copy is clear, concise and ticks all the boxes when it comes to delighting both your audience and search engines.
For more information, please do not hesitate to get in touch – we have a range of flexible, affordable content packages available, all designed to support businesses like yours.
[instagram feed=”8964″]