Website content writing – DIY or hire a professional?

While every website project is different, there’s one thing they often have in common… leaving the content writing and SEO as an afterthought.

The problem for many business owners (and web designers) is that the focus tends to fall on the visual aspects and functionality. These are, of course, the first foundations of any website, but while everyone is thinking about cool images, funky layouts and the ‘bells and whistles’… content and audience visibility tends to take a back seat. Which is bad news – as these are actually the elements that will ultimately drive your website’s success.

When the question of content writing eventually crops up, clients usually fob it off or declare “Don’t worry, we’ll write it ourselves. Easy!”

But is it really that easy?

What’s so hard about website content writing?

Good question.

You know your business, your customers and what your services entail. Why shouldn’t write your own content? You’ve already investment a big chunk of your business development budget into building a new website, so why pay for professional copywriting when it’s, well, just a case of putting a few words down to explain your business, right?

Wrong.

The problem is that content writing often becomes the sticking point that stalls a web project. Plus there’s also a genuine skill to it.

Here are some reasons you may want to consider before deciding to write for yourself, or hire a professional copywriter to take care of your web content:

1. Time – even if you could create website content to rival a copywriter, ask yourself honestly, do you have the time? Even if you think you do, we can tell you from experience that the client holding things up from a content delivery perspective is the bane of many a project. It’s not unheard of for a website to be designed, built and almost ready to go for 6-12 months. So your investment is sitting there earning you nothing, while you’re paying for hosting and other ongoing costs that may apply.
2. Precision – once your website is built and the design structure is set, every content field or design device needs populating with relevant and engaging copy. Which means replacing the holding copy (usually lorem ipsum) with awesome text of the same length. This could be a few paragraphs, a small snippet under an icon, or a series of same-sized sections that need to be kept consistent. Usually, it’s a combination of these. So you need to make sure you can ‘write to order’.
3. User journey/experience – writing for a website isn’t quite like producing a report, an email or even a whitepaper. You need to understand how to create a user journey within the content and throughout the website, thinking about how different pages/information relates to one another, what your user needs, how to guide them there and how to turn their visits into conversions.
4. Structure – similarly, you need to understand engagement – and how to structure your web content accordingly. How do you start? How do you end? How do you populate the bits in-between while ensuring the order of, and the information itself,  makes sense to the reader – who may not have much knowledge of your business offering. These considerations span further than your human users too. It also means writing your website copy according to SEO best practice, and ensuring you capture and keep everyone’s interest.
5. Grammar – even if you’re not great at grammar, and get your spelling a bit mixed up sometimes, it’s easy to assume you can simply use a software spell-check function and you’ll be home and dry. But this isn’t necessarily the case. They get it wrong. Plus you can bend some rules, but not others. And when it comes down to it, an accurate and polished end-product matters if you want to create a truly professional impression.
6. Tone of voice – a lot of the magic in great website content writing is personality. It’s about thinking about your audience, and writing in a style that speaks to them on the right level. A B2C audience requires something different to a B2B audience for example. You can whack out some fairly staid and stuffy content pretty easily if you’re generally comfortable with putting fingertips to keyboard, but where’s your hook? How do you ensure you sound relatable, approachable, knowledgeable and helpful? How do you keep it consistent over what could be thousands of words in all? How do you make each one count? How will you handle headings, straplines and those snappy bits of copy for those cool icons you spent so much time working on with your designer?!

Unfortunately, the reality is that writing for a website is much harder than it first appears – and we haven’t even delved into the SEO aspect of content writing yet (watch out for our next blog)!

So if you have a site ready and waiting for engaging, optimised content, or require a new website and would like help with the design, SEO and website content writing, give us a shout.