Web content is not about you. It’s about your prospect or customer.

This is critical to making web content successful. However, based on frequent discussions with business clients and students alike, it’s a concept that’s often not recognized and appreciated.

The digital world has sped things up. Television and billboards have much less impact and ability to influence the masses. There are more choices, more noise. Less time, less patience. As a result, consumers are now exceptionally proficient at ignoring marketing messages.

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The key to successful conversion rates is getting information to the right people at the right time.

Internet technology provides businesses the ability to pin-point markets at precise moments. However, if you’re not delivering the right information, the entire effort, investment and process is severely flawed.

The Web is a fantastic medium to determine what web writing works and what doesn’t. Recent A/B split tests targeting US and European audiences helped Webcopyplus establish how web writing approaches and styles influence online consumers’ behavior.

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Your homepage is one of the key pages on your website. It’s often the starting point for visitors and therefore viewed most often. So what should your homepage communicate?

Your homepage should:

• Introduce the purpose and scope of your website
• Set the tone and build credibility

Important homepage elements:

• Header and footer
• Logo and tagline
• Clear menu and table of contents
• Company overview
• Key benefits you offer
• News, events and announcements

Like other pages, keep the design and messages simple, and use small images so the homepage loads quickly. Also, use direct, simple sentences.

Every slight improvement to your homepage’s web content will help you create a good first — and lasting — impression.

While discussing a client’s project, one of the web copywriters at Webcopyplus suggested breaking up web content does a lot more than promote scanability.

It started a discussion about the additional benefits of segmenting web content into digestible chunks. Here’s what we came up with.

One-topic sentences and paragraphs help web copywriters:

• Deliver scannable web content
• Layer information (small blocks of text can link to other blocks)
• Organize information effectively (easy to arrange and view)
• Join similar topics
• Provide content that’s easier to remember
• Reduce or eliminate scrolling

Concise web content doesn’t just happen. You need to plan your topics and approach. And once you complete the initial draft, keep cutting away all those dead words!

The extra time you spend or invest in your web content will help ensure your online guests enjoy their stay, complete their tasks and keep coming back for more.

More than 88% of Internet users believe they are served poor content on the Web, according to an online poll conducted by Webcopyplus.

When asked to rate the overall quality of content on the Web, poll respondents selected the following options:

1. Poor 88.5%
2. Satisfactory 9.8%
3. Good 1.5%
4. Excellent 0.2%

A total of 480 Internet users participated in the web writing firm’s online poll during a four-month period that ended in April of 2008.

Subsequent interviews with web users revealed multiple common concerns, including:

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A total of 480 Internet users who participated in a recent Webcopyplus poll rated the overall quality of web content, and the marks are less that stellar. In fact, more than 88% of the online poll respondents believe they are served “poor” content on the Web.

Additionally, subsequent interviews with web users revealed numerous common concerns.

Read the full story: Poll: Web Delivers Poor Content.

Clients are regularly surprised to find out the web copywriters at Webcopyplus aim to deliver web content at a grade 8 language level.

The reasons are many: to promote readability, scanability and usability. Simple connects. You decrease the chances of alienating your audience.

While there are exceptions, most target audiences will have varied expertise, in both the Internet and subject matter. A Web or subject expert can endure simplicity, but a novice might not be able to identify with or comprehend complex information.

If your business needs to communicate complicated information, an effective solution is to layer various degrees of details through links. That way, when necessary, your visitors can drill down and get the finer points.

In any case, web copywriters should always go out of their way to keep web content clear, concise and easy to read. Simple web content translates to more connections and higher conversion rates.

Consumers consume information all day long, so it’s difficult to catch their attention with copywriting — forget about influencing them to actually do something.

So, as a copywriter, what choices are there?

Many. But the best one, which proves to work time and time again, is delivering information that’s relevant to the target audience.

Information is communication. Communicate about something that has nothing to do with a particular person’s interest, and you won’t connect. Speak to his or her needs or wants and you get a completely different response.

When it comes to the Web, copywriting isn’t just something you store and retrieve. To engage online visitors, web content must at least touch on topics or issues that are important to the targeted individual.

That’s when web content connects, influences and converts. And that’s when your web content actually works on the behalf of your business.

When creating web content, always go for relevant. It’ll consistently get you the best return.

Information layering is a practical technique that helps online visitors quickly gather information relevant to their needs.

In brief, high level information is provided with links to more detail and supplementary web content.

Webcopyplus employs this strategy for clients, and finds it especially useful for IT firms, which generally need to target a wide-ranging audience.

Take, for example, an IT services page that offers an overview of offerings, including Network consulting, Disaster planning and Web hosting. Each noted service would include a link to more specific information.

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Despite major drawbacks of Flash-based sites, some business owners continue to fall into this trap.

As previously noted in Backbone Magazine, Webcopyplus recognizes Flash is an outstanding tool for adding audio, video and animation to a site. However, Flash-based sites can’t be indexed by search engine spiders, which account for the majority of traffic to websites. As a result, these beautiful websites often draw little, if any, traffic.

Moreover, Flash intros prove to be a waste of time and resources. Fortunately, most businesses and designers are moving away from this pointless gimmick, which squanders visitors’ time and web owners’ money.

The Flash topic is one that many individuals are passionate about. In fact, the noted Backbone article prompted a prolonged Ubuntu Forums debate that involved more than 3,400 viewers, more than 300 votes and more than 100 responses.

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