Posted by Marley
Building a website from scratch is a pretty incredible feat if you ask me. As the first person in the line of people who write the copy, edit the copy, and translate the copy to the website itself, it has always amazed me what that copy goes through to become what it eventually does. But how do you know what to put in each section? How much “About Us”? Who is really going to read our entire “story”? If you’ve had questions like this, don’t fear! As someone who has written copy for too many websites to remember, I’m here to help you. I went from having never written website copy before, to creating multiple websites from nothing each month. While it is certainly a learning process, once you get it, you’ve got it!
1. About Us
In my opinion and experience, everybody wants to know who they are buying their products and services from. As someone who has been on both sides of a website, I usually have the most fun reading and writing about a company, its purpose, and its values. However, as fun as the About Us sections can be, it’s best to keep these short and sweet. Attention spans are shorter than ever these days, and keeping a potential customer or client’s attention on your website is much more imperative than including every detail of your company’s story. So keep your About Us section limited to the following: year of founding and 1-2 sentences about why the founder founded it, purpose statement, values, and why that all translates into an incredible product or service. Check out Pulse’s About Us section for an example!
2. Our Story
I know exactly what you’re thinking … “How is Our Story different from our About Us?” You would be surprised, my friend. If your About Us section is top-notch and teases just right about your founding, potential customers will want to know the full story. This is the section to give them just that! Make it more casual, relatable, and inspiring. Include your values again and why they translated from everyday life into a fully-fledged company. Include humor if it would work for your target audience. This section is license to have a little bit more fun with copy, so go all out!
3. Blogs
Blogs are one of the top ways to boost your SEO and bring your website to the top of the Google search page – plus, they are often really helpful in pushing content that can help solidify your brand’s image. For example, at Pulse, we publish 2 blog articles per month. These are riddled with keywords to bring us up higher on search pages, but they are also packed full of meaningful content that helps our clients, potential clients, and potential team members, get a sense of who we are and what our brand is all about. Our Community at Heart blogs are one of the best illustrators of that. We are able to display our work, which is essentially our product, show what we love, which is giving back to our community, and push essential keywords that will keep our website close to the top of search engine results. Blogs can be about anything that is relevant to you, your company, and your brand, and they can be as long or short as you see fit (ours are 1,000-2,000 words). Blogs can be super fun or serious, and the page itself is usually formatted relatively the same on any website you find. If you haven’t started implementing blogs yet, we highly recommend it!!
4. Meet the Team
Like I said before, customers are going to want to see and know the people who they are buying products or services from, but at the same time, they are not interested in your full life story. This is an opportunity to do two things. First, you can have each team member write a small blurb about themself, 3-4 sentences, and include that under a small photo of them smiling and looking pleasant. If your target market would appreciate it, the photos can be silly or showcase the personalities of your team members. However, if you sell a more serious or professional service or product, like a law firm for example, and you want to keep your Meet the Team page more consistent, you can create a few uniform questions and gather your team’s responses, then use those under a smiling photo of your team. If it fits your brand, you can be funny if you think your target audience would appreciate that more. I.E “what animal would you be” and “if you could only eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be.” Or you can take the more heartfelt route, i.e. “what is your favorite part about this company” and “if you weren’t working here what would you be doing?” No matter what questions you choose, or if you choose to have each team member write a small blurb, be sure to include information that your target audience will appreciate!
5. Contact Us
As a writer, this is always one of my favorite sections, no matter what website. On Contact pages, you have almost free reign to go crazy and use humor, alliteration, and other rhetorical devices to make this page enjoyable since there is usually not much copy that goes here. A classic is always “Questions, Comments or Concerns?” but you can get much more clever and funny here and give customers a call to action. Again, be careful with humor and use it sparingly unless it is specifically tailored to your target market demographic.
Writing website copy is almost always fun, but it is no easy task! If you’ve been struggling with figuring out how to fill your website with content that is relevant and enticing while also being short and sweet enough to keep people’s attention, you are certainly not alone. It took me years of experience, mistakes, learning, and growing to feel comfortable enough to write an article to give tips. I hope that my small collection of hints and personal experience can aid in being a good start in helping to figure out what fits where.