Who is your website?
Your website is your trusted employee, working 24/7/365 to greet, guide, inform, persuade and convert your prospects and customers from around the world. What company persona does the site present to your visitors? Who meets them at your online door?
If the writing on the majority of sites is to be believed, business everywhere suffers from a severe personality deficit. Surely business owners and CEOs don’t think of their companies the way their sites speak for them.
So… who is your website? What voice does it use? Confident leaders? Experienced veterans? Friendly professionals? Niche experts? The hot shop?
Perhaps a better question would be: “Who do you want your priceless prospects to meet when they arrive on-site?” No site owner would ever answer: “We want a cold, impersonal, unengaged voice.” So, how come the Web is awash with enough corp-speak to scroll five times ‘round the world?
It’s the in-house content development. Has to be. I can’t think of any other alibi for the turgid, un-engaging stuff that populates so many sites—notably, but by no means exclusively, b2b sites.
When content development is assigned to anyone other than a pro web copywriter—i.e. to anyone in house—factors converge to make bad content inevitable.
Factor One: The in-house writer’s first recourse will be to the company’s print materials. If I had $1 for every brochure page pasted holus bolus to the web, I could buy my own oil well. Content written for print just doesn’t work on the Web.
Second factor: in-house writing will almost always think from the Company out, rather than from the site visitor back. This effectively prevents persona-focused planning and content— which, in turn, switches off the interactive urge and triggers all that 3rd-Person-Neutered verbiage.
Third factor: Content will have to satisfy a number of internal stake holders, likely the writer’s bosses, without a coherent strategy to guide it. The in-house writer will lose every battle.
Fourth factor: content optimization will range from incomplete, down through misguided to if-present-at-all.
Factor five: Many site owners honestly don’t know what is, or isn’t, good web copywriting and content. They don’t know the criteria of either their prospects or the engines. They don’t know how visitors use the Web. Why would they?
And if they do think about who they want their website to be, they discover that writing about and portraying oneself convincingly is as tough for a company as it is for an individual.
DIY copywriting is not an economy—it’s a traffic and conversion killer. Hire a pro.
