SEO, web copywriting & internet marketing

If you’ve got a small business website, there’s a good chance you wrote the content yourself. And it’s likely you don’t update the copy (words) on key pages very often.

Here are 6 DIY ways to freshen up your website’s content to make it more readable.

1. Break up content with sub-headings and short paragraphs

When we read a web page, we usually scan through content looking for key information. So if your content is bunched up in big chunks of text, your customers are less likely to get the information they need.

Instead, use short paragraphs based around one idea per paragraph. Paragraphs of just one, two or three sentences are fine for web copywriting.

Then break up your content further with sub-headings to help your users scan the page more easily.

2. Use ‘I’, ‘us’ and ‘you’

When writing avoid referring to yourself and your customers in the third person. Instead, use personal language like ‘I’, ‘us’ and ‘you’.

Read these two examples - who would you rather buy from?

The company is very sorry but can’t send the packages to customers until December 21st.

We’re very sorry but we can’t send the packages to you until December 21st.

3. Use simple words

Review the words you’ve used in your content. Are they are simple as they could be? Have you used jargon or ‘corporate speak’?

This doesn’t only go for words you use to describe your business and services. Make you have used the shortest most simple version of every word.

Consider these examples:

• Demanding vs Hard
• Utilise vs Use
• Approximately vs About
• Discover vs Find

4. Start with your conclusion

People will visit your site for information, to buy your products, or to make an opinion about your services.

So include the most important information on a page near the top. That way it’s no big loss if they don’t read the whole page – they get the most important information right away.

For example, if a page is about the areas your company covers, that information should be in the first paragraph. Any additional information can then follow.

5. Link to other pages

Link to other pages on your site if appropriate. For example, if you talk about delivery options or particular services on your page, link to relevant pages using those words. (The words you use in a link  are called ‘anchor text’.)

Just make sure you avoid words like ‘click here’ that don’t describe the content of the page you’re linking to. It’s an SEO copywriting no-no and bad for accessibility.

6. Read out loud

When you’ve finished re-writing your content, read it out loud. You’ll find out straight away if something needs some extra commas or a rewrite.

When you do a search on Google, you get your search results almost instantly. So how does Google trawl through the billions of pages on the web to deliver such quick results?

To rank your web pages in their search engine results pages (SERPs), Google has to do 3 things:

1. Crawl your web pages
2. Index your web pages in its database
3. Decide how relevant your web pages are

Crawling your pages

Google sends out a computer program called a spider to index new and updated pages on the web. The spider (called Googlebot) is controlled by other computer programs. These programs decide which pages to crawl and how often.

The spiders start by crawling pages they have visited before. They also detect links they find on these pages and add them to the list of pages to crawl.

Indexing your pages

The spider processes information on each page it crawls, and stores it in Google’s index – a massive database of all the websites and web pages Google has crawled.

Google indexes all the words it sees on your site and where the words are. It doesn’t just index the ‘visible’ words you see on the page – it takes note of things like title tags, meta-description, file names, and the words used in links (anchor text) and much much more.

Google can’t index all types of web pages. For example, it struggles to read content in Flash and Javascript, and cannot read text in images.

Relevancy

So, when you do a search on Google, most of the hard work is done. Google just dips into its databases, finds all relevant pages and then ranks them by what pages they think are most relevant to your search query.

Google uses over 200 ranking factors to decide how to rank your web pages. Anything from the country where your website is hosted, to the words used around links to your website, can affect your ranking.