A web copy, whether created or curated, is aimed at driving positive customer actions. If written well, the website content can translate into leads, customers, and sales.

Businesses literally break their banks to get a powerful, sales-driving website that flaunts aesthetically pleasing designs, user-friendly navigation, robust shopping carts, and a multitude of bells and whistles. Is that all a good website should have? What about the content?

No one can deny the importance that content bears; it drives action; other elements just support those actions. Now how would you define quality content? Does it resonate with your audience effectively? Does it magnetize new users or keep the present ones engaged? A well-written content does it all and eventually, inspires the intended action. However, not all actions generate instant results. Consider the number of times a prospective buyer browses your website right before contacting you upfront. That’s the beauty of content! Whether your buyer acts now or later, your web content plays its part ‘to inspire action’.

Actions are everything your web copy should be about. Great content is the one written—line by line—to guide actions. It can be anything from completing an inquiry form, registering for an event, promoting your brand, subscribing to a newsletter, and so on. It should compel each visitor on your website to forge ahead through the conversion funnel.

Here are the ten tips you should consider to create content that attracts and engages your visitors:

1. Provide Value

Get into your customer’s shoes! Enlightening them with ‘what they get’ from you is much more crucial than informing them ‘who you are’. In this self-absorbed society, people are not really interested to discover a great deal about you, until it is of some value to them.

No wonder, those boring, sleep-inducing missions and visions have been eliminated from the web content of the most corporate websites. Rather, people prefer to mention company facts and achievements that can exhibit how their competencies, skills, and expertise add value to your client.

Moreover, you should try to focus on user intent, rather than just presenting a salesy content. User intent represents what the users want to acquire when they type in their queries on the search engine bar. Make sure you actually understand what the user wants before you try to write an article for them.

2. Instill Personality

Your content does not breath, yet it needs to have a personality that sets it apart from others. Every web page should exhibit consistency in the personality and create a comfort zone around the visitors as they keep on reading your copy. This does not mean you should go for outlandish content, but you have to be sure that your web content fits you and your niche market well.

Furthermore, you have to take the USP (unique selling points) and make it as influential and stimulating as possible. Remember this at all stages of the web copywriting process. Doing this will also enable you to write something that can directly target conversions.

Nike is not just any sports apparel maker, neither is Apple a usual computer manufacturing brand, nor Starbucks a coffee brewer. They are much more than that. What makes these brands supreme in their niche markets is their potential to touch their consumers’ hearts. Nike poses itself as the choice of dreamers, athletes, and champions. Starbucks represents itself as a closely-knitted community, whereas Apple inspires creativity and innovation.

3. Focus on Your Customers

Much like providing value to your customers, your content should revolve around the wants and needs of your customers. Everything else in copywriting means nothing unless you know who your customers are. If you don’t know them, create an in-depth persona of your target users. Keep in mind that your consumers won’t care about your product until and unless you care about them. Highlight your plus points and the unique ways you are going to help them that others do not.

When you are writing for a brand, product or services, you understand that selling is just a constituent in the formula. However, great content produced consistently can address a certain problem; you will increase sales and earn loyal customers throughout the process.

4. Use Trigger Words

Strong verbs sell. Period. Rather than embellishing your content with standard and boring verbs, energize your text using attention-getting action verbiage. Dwell on the results you want to get.

Such words drive action; they are active, concrete and remove all doubts. They own the power to create an impact and spark actions. Therefore, you need to choose the words judiciously and make your readers feel as if they are playing a part in your unfolding story. Use emotional trigger words in the headings, body paragraphs, and call-to-action phrases.

5. Keep it Error-free

There should be no room for errors in your content. Your website should stay free from typographical, structural or conceptual errors. Having an occasional spelling or grammar mistake is acceptable and can be shrugged off, but errors more than that can question your credibility.

Don’t direct your readers down to a pathway full of hindrances, rather provide them with a clearly defined route. Grammatical glitches and typographical errors can make your content harder to read, and can put your readers off.

If possible, recheck or proofread your content after a day or night after it has been written on. You can easily find the errors in the content with fresh eyes. In case you don’t have much time, try to take a short break, you can consume that time by doing any other productive task and then switch your concentration back to the content.

6. Add Calls to Action

Every webpage should have one call to action as a minimum. With no call to actions in your content, you won’t be able to steer visitors towards the next intended stage in the conversion process. Use your content judiciously by leveraging calls to action to channelize the visitor across your website and conversion funnel.

Unless there is a sense of urgency on your website, your reader will skip to other websites quickly and keep on exploring what the search engine brings to them. Try using the call-to-action as an essential part of your web copy, position it at prominently on your web page, and see it making difference.

7. Make it Scannable and Readable

In this high-paced world, nobody has enough time to go through your whole content, especially when there’s nothing but plain knowledge. Most of your visitors would skim your content to get a quick idea if there is any value in here for them. If they find it interesting, they will read it whole, more deeply. Try to write and organize your content in a way so that the key points can easily be noticed without detailed reading.

Remember that adjectives and adverbs, at times, are the deadwood. Eliminating these words clarifies your content, making them readable.

8. Use Short Sentences

A standard sentence comprises of around 15 to 20 words. When you go over 20 words, your readers might want to tune out. Short sentences can engage readers and make them pay attention. The more your audience stays focused, the more it will convert eventually.

Remember not to over-fill your content with short sentences. Reserve such verbiage to show your readers what is important.

Here’s a great example: “Baby dress for 2 yr. old, for sale, never worn.”

See, your sentences don’t need to be lengthy for conveying a story. You just need to say the right things and let your reader’s imaginations fill the blanks.

9. Don’t Overuse Vocab

You are writing for your readers— most of them won’t get impressed by a content embellished with big, hard-to-understand words; they will just get confused. So try to choose them carefully.

Treat your website visitors as wild animals. They are in quest of information or a product to purchase – more like a predator hounds his next meal. Just as a hungry predator doesn’t like to waste the time in getting what it wants, your web visitors do not stay in the mood to browse through words and pages on your website to get what they are looking for. They want things quick and effortlessly.

Web visitors quickly peek at your website to evaluate whether they have landed at the right site or not. They do not have to know it for sure. They are just eager to make a quick decision.

10. Link Out to Other Sites

Website linking has been a crucial part of a website’s SEO, but it can be negative when overdone. However, linking to websites that are more authoritative can benefit your website and fortify your credibility. Remember to the purpose of linking—that is to bolster your website’s authority or provide your visitors with information that your website lack, but make sure it is not affecting your conversion process.

Usually, linking involves outreaching to other similar websites or blogs. It can be very effective in creating long-term relationships with key influencers in your targeted niche; these relationships are a testament that your business is highly regarded and trusted and can create genuine evangelists and supporters for the business.

A good link from a high-traffic website can result in a boost in traffic, as well. Finding out such a website that is relevant to your business too is a plus. Chances are that the generated traffic is also relevant and may cause a boost in your sales too.

To Wrap Up

Many online stores and product-driven websites try to reduce the use of content in order to steer the visitors directly to the product. However, you should need to remember that sometimes products are not what your visitors are looking for.

Providing your website visitors with information can help you sell your products or services. Eliminating content can restrict an important part of your visitor’s quest for information that addresses questions, provides justification and provides them with a reason to go on. Use your content in a way that draws them in, engages them and entices them to take the desired action.

Before you even start mapping up your website and working on your copy, you need to dwell over your target demographic, evaluate exactly whom you’re ideal customers are, and write copy that centers on their lifestyle, interests, and addresses their problems.

With these tips into consideration, take the time to analyze your website and consider it objectively. You probably do not have to revise your site’s copy word by word, but with these practices, you will likely start seeing a spike in your numbers— eventually sales.