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Cut too many words from your website and it may look cool, but will your online enquiries run cold?
Less Is More. Keep It Simple. These are popular phrases I often hear applied in marketing terms, including discussions around how much information to put on your website and, for the most part, they have merit. Particularly given current web design trends for loads of white space and short, punchy paragraphs of one or two sentences maximum – anything else may look overly “wordy” by comparison.
Post-pandemic, there is definitely a culture of valuing our time and casual visitors to your website really want to get to the point and see the value of your product or service super quickly, without having to read reams and reams of information before they get their questions (and therefore their needs) met.
With balance, this “less is more” approach to copy on your website can be a real boon to your business. You can quickly and easily convey your understanding of their challenge or need, plus direct them to your offered solution, within a couple of sentences – sounds great, right?
Trouble is, take this too far and you could pay the price in terms of search engine visibility as, without all those lovely key words and phrases used by your potential clients to find your company actually appearing on the pages of your website, they may never find you at all!
Or – arguably worse – they DO find you, only to fail to connect the dots as they can’t instantly see the familiar terms and descriptions of the issue they’re trying to resolve by coming to you in the first place.
And if they don’t connect, they don’t engage – they just leave.
So how do you tip this balance in your favour?
As with every successful website, the secret lies in the strategy – moulding the whole site around your ideal client profile. Once you have a crystal clear image of that person in your mind, ask yourself:
- Are they big readers? Do they mention the latest business book or industry article in their social posts or conversations?
- Do they love research? Have you heard them speak of R&D or do they follow the disruptors in their industry to learn what’s new and upcoming?
- Where are they active online? Do they post or comment on LinkedIn every day or are they YouTube fans and share video links regularly?
These few simple questions, will tell you if they want a LOT of information before deciding on a new purchase or supplier – or whether they just want to get to the good stuff. Knowing this can give you a firm foundation on which to build a successful site aimed directly at your dream clients.
We applied this to a website we created for a national Recycling Compliance Scheme provider whose target audience are short on time (so don’t want to read for hours), but also need the assurance that choosing to work with this Company will meet all their legal compliance obligations at the lowest possible cost. Although our client initially wanted a site practically bare of wording and paragraphs, our knowledge of their target market told us this would not return the results they were hoping for, so advised that they instead include short, snappy titles and headings throughout the site – leading to more detailed information and accreditations to reassure potential customers they were in the right place.
The result is a site which ranks highly for the most-searched key terms for their industry and the company enjoying steady and consistent growth in their customer base, even though the website is their only form of advertising.
The technology we live with is ever-changing, and that’s no bad thing. Just remember that underneath it all is a human being in need of the solution you offer – get that across clearly, quickly and invite them to read on without swamping them in text or giving them a blank page.
Think about it – newspapers still have a large single headline on the front for a reason…!
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