Seven Must-Have Elements of Copywriting for Conversion

Copy is often the last thing to be added to your website.

Small business owners of successfully converting websites understand that it’s the copy that will cause their website to stand out from their  competitiors in the online marketing world.

Copywriting for conversion necessitates an understanding not only of the audiences you’re writing for, but also the best ways to appeal to those audiences.

1. Write to a specific customer.

This may seem counterintuitive, shouldn’t you be writing for all of your customers?  When you write for everyone you actually write to no one. To engage your audience your copy needs to feel like it’s a long email addressed to the person who is reading it. Write as if you are speaking to a specific person and you are more likely to write compelling, engaging copy.

2. Write with a specific keyword in mind.

Writing with a specific keyword in mind will keep your copy focused, on track, and will help your onsite SEO efforts. Whenever I try to put  3 or 4 different keywords into one blog or article, the piece seems to wander all over the place which makes for poor reading material. Since the goal is to get your visitors engaged, keep it simple for yourself and your audience, and just focus on one keyword per article.

3. Avoid jargon

If you work in a technical industry, it’s easy to get caught up in jargon either because you’re trying to impress, or simply because that’s the way you’re used to discussing your business. But understand that the vast majority of your audience will quickly get lost if you use too much jargon. Unless your audience is highly technical, keeping your writing at about an 8^th grade comprehension level is about right.

4. Break it up.

Rarely will a visitor read your carefully crafted copy straight through from start to finish. Instead, they will scan. Make it easy for your visitors to find what they wants b breaking content up into skimmable chunks using bullets, numbers, and lists.

5. Is it relevant?

Are you losing your readers at hello? If your title and first couple of sentences are not relevant to your visitors query, they’re gone. Your visitors are on a hunt. They need a question answered, a solution to a problem, a need satisfied. Think about your own search pattern. If you go to a site and it doesn’t look like it can answer your question or solve your problem you hit the back button and click on the next promising entry in the search results, right?  Your visitors are doing the same thing. Copy that isn’t relevant, that doesn’t deliver what’s promised in the search results or PPC ad, is copy that won’t be read.

6. Give them something of value

Does your copy pass the “So What?” test? How do you help your visitors solve their problem? Give them something of value. Stand out from the crowd of competitors by thinking about your visitors. What do they need to know? What do they need to learn? What will be really helpful? What questions will they have? Why should your visitors do business with your company?

7. Ask for action

Never leave a reader hanging at the end of an article without a next step. Ask for action on every page and do so clearly, concisely, and convincingly.

Copywriting for conversion means putting a little more thought and planning into your written content, but you’ll be rewarded with visitors who spend more time on your pages, who come back again and again, and who ultimately turn into customers.