The less time visitors spend on your website reading and engaging with its content, the less likely they are to turn into subscribers, paying customers, clients, or partners.
Understanding the real-world impacts of poorly written web copy is essential in 2018, especially if you write copy for a website or manage content for one.
Here are some of the more notable problems you’ll experience when your website has poorly written web copy.
If your web copy doesn’t speak directly to its target audience (i.e., your ideal customers and subscribers) and what they care about, your website will not remain a credible online source.
More importantly, if your web copy isn’t structured properly or is riddled with grammatical and spelling mistakes, you’ll lose your credibility as a business or online resource within seconds. According to research parsed by Business.com, you have seven seconds to make a good first impression when meeting a new business acquaintance in person, but only about 0.2 seconds online.
So, not only does your website have to be designed so that it’s visually appealing and relevant to your target audience, but its copy needs to be direct, well written, and free of grammatical errors and typos. Otherwise, people will get a bad impression of your website and its content and will abandon it within seconds.
If your web copy isn’t engaging, doesn’t tell a unique story about you or your organization, or contains long-winded, vague, redundant, and irrelevant copy, your website visitors will get bored and abandon the site within a few seconds.
Ultimately, poorly written web copy will cause you to lose online business and an engaged online audience. If you don’t immediately establish trust and credibility with your readers, they will quickly abandon your website. And the chances of them ever returning to it are slim or nonexistent. Why would people want to visit a website they once deemed as subpar, untrustworthy, and boring when they have thousands of other websites at their fingertips to choose from at any given second?
View this post published by Web Designer Depot and this post published by Neil Patel, founder of Kissmetrics, for real-world examples of poorly written web copy. Web copy that’s poorly written usually suffers from one or more of the following major blunders:
If you want your website visitors to read more than 28% of your web copy, here are some tips to keep in mind.
Do you have any tips for how to improve poorly written web copy, that could be added to the list above? Or do you have a web copy blunder of your own to share with us? If so, be sure to leave a comment below.