Writing or Re-writing Business Website Content: What to Know Before Contacting a Web Copywriter

December 3, 2009 by Rita Marshall 

Photo by Inno’vision

Over the last few months, I’ve worked on a few business websites. The clients have been from a variety of different industries, but I’ve found two things are always the most important, no matter the industry: the insights of the business owner and the ability of the web copywriter.

What Does a Business Owner Bring to the Website?

You bring insight and experience to explain what makes you the best. Before you even sit down with a web copywriter, think about your business, your customers and what makes you special. If you sat down with me, I’d ask you the following questions (among others):

1) What does your business do?
2) What makes you special?
3) Who are your customers?
4) Who are your competitors and why are you different?
5) What do your customers like about you and why?

Maybe you noticed that questions 2, 4 and 5 are different ways of asking the same thing. I REALLY want to find out what makes you different from everyone else! Every business can claim good quality or good customer service. But how is it unique in your case?

One multi-service company I wrote about only expanded their services because their customers asked them to provide more and more services that no other company was providing. One company’s competitors shipped in all of their products, while my client’s company grew most of their products almost from scratch.

This goes back to my business biography post; you need to tell a story on your website, preferably one that ends with a happy customer buying your product and riding off into the sunset. Your unique insights into your business, as well as your experience, gives you a great information base. Now all you need is a writer to flesh it out, and yes, you do need a web copywriter.

What Does a Web Copywriter Bring to the Website?

So if you have the insight, why do you need a web copywriter to write the content for your business website? Because web copy needs to be highly targeted and short. It usually takes me more time to write a 400 word article than an 800 word article. Sound strange? Consider this: crafting a 400 word article out of a mountain of information means sifting through to find and polish the absolute best and ruthlessly discarding the rest.

A good web page will be limited to maybe 250 – 350 words per page and should include good SEO;  you can imagine how much work goes into picking the absolute best 350 words!

I also use the information a client gives me on his or her company’s history, strengths and goals to draft an outline of what pages they should have on their website; or what pages should be kept and dropped from their current website.

So don’t just throw up any block of copy on different pages on your website and figure it’s okay: search engines don’t like that, and if they don’t like it, your customers will never find you.