Are you tracking how your copy is performing?
You are naive if you think that web writing is all about hiring a copywriter to write a few thousand words for your business website, uploading it to your CMS, and publishing it.
Good web writing is an ongoing process that involves:
- revisiting published copy,
- tracking results and then
- rewriting to achieve maximum impact.
Study Your Data
Kirsten Wright wrote yesterday about how important it is to gather information on how your web copy is doing. I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to track how visitors to your site react to your website.
Google Analytics (which is free and easy to install) makes it easy to gather all sorts of information on your website including the keywords that people use to find your site as well as the most popular pages.
The statistics you gather may throw up a few surprises and suggest new areas that you should be focusing on. For example, Google Analytics showed me over time that one of my most popular posts was a piece I’d written on Twitter Search. On reflection, however, I could see that the article itself wasn’t substantial enough so I went back and rewrote the piece including a clearer call-to-action to boot.
Only by tracking my site over a period of time was I able to see that visitors to my site were flocking to a page that I hadn’t really thought of as important.
Good Web Writing Strategy
- Use a web statistics programme like Google Analytics to gather data on how your site is performing.
- Schedule time each week to study your data.
- Identify pages on your website that could be performing better – converting to sales or business enquiries.
- Tweak weak copy, headlines, layout, etc,
The Secret of Great Web Writing
Think of your website as an evolving canvas. Copy should be assessed, tracked, tested and then tweaked to gain maximum effect.
Image: FlickrCC
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