Beware the English Major! The Top 4 Signs of Ineffective Web Copy

Posted by Laura Bergells

June 26, 2007

You may know English. But can you write convincingly — for the web?

Beware the English Major! I have worked with English majors who cannot seem to write web copy that anyone wants to read! One English major I worked with focused obsessively on using big words to ”sound smart”. Instead of bending the rules of grammar and punctuation to sound more personal, conversational, and lively — she insisted on following rigid rules that made her copy sound stiff and robotic.

Unfortunately, her Super Smarty-Pants, Follow-the-Rules copy didn’t emotionally connect with an internet audience. People abandoned the site in droves, never to return. Her approach might have worked well for her Master’s thesis — but it didn’t make people want to buy software online.

So how can you tell if your copy is really connecting with your audience? Here are the top four (and completely objective!) signs that indicate that you write great web copy for your site.

1. You get decent traffic. This indicates that you probably write clickable title tags along with concise meta descriptions. Further, your on-page written content is so brilliant that other sites have linked to your site. Search engines tend to reward well-written, linked-in sites with higher rankings.

2. People subscribe to your site. When your visitors subscribe to your site, they have voted with their mouse fingers! Essentially, subscribing means that your visitors like your content and style — and that they want to read more.

3. Visitors keep coming back. Your site gets lots of repeat visitors. People cannot wait to read what you are going to write about next, so they keep coming back. You enjoy the “high visitor loyalty” metric!

4. People take desired actions after visiting your site. They buy stuff. They comment. They contact you. They bookmark. They download your reports. They click on your other pages, wanting more.

If none of these four objective signs above apply to your site, it may be poorly written. (or it might be a brand new site — or a badly coded site. But those are different topics that I’ll cover on another day!)

Oh, don’t get me wrong: your site may deploy perfect grammar. And your internet marketing committee may have agonized over every word choice to insure its absolute perfection.

But if people are not coming to your site, if they are not subscribing and coming back, and if they are not buying, clicking, commenting, or contacting – you may have to face facts.

You may have a poorly written site.

Yes, words matter on the web. You may know English — but do you know how to write for the web?