As an Internet copywriter, I of course recommend hiring a professional writer to write the copy for your website, rather than trying to do it yourself.  Yes, everybody can write — but can everybody write well enough to make up a customer’s mind for them?  I don’t think so.

But if you won’t take my advice and hire a writer, at the very least follow these guidelines for writing your content yourself.

• Write in short, punchy paragraphs and include lots of lists.  There is nothing more likely to make a potential customer click away from your site than presenting them with a long page of solid text.  Large paragraphs are SCARY to a web surfer.  Therefore to keep their attention, you need to give them short bits of text that they can digest quickly.
• No keyword stuffing!  Keyword stuffing is cramming keywords into your text until it hardly even makes sense, in order to try to improve your search engine rankings.  Even if the search engines don’t catch you doing this and penalize you for it, you are sure to lose customers by making your website appear not worth reading.
• Use keywords that make sense.  No matter how frequently it is searched for, “ADT Phoenix” is an awkward phrase and difficult to work into your copy.  You won’t earn any points with your customers for sounding uneducated, and in any case you need more than hits on your site — you also need sales.
• Provide lots of good content that your customers will find useful.  The way to generate more traffic to your site, and therefore more sales, is to make your site useful enough that people who come to it keep reading, and hopefully even come back.  Articles and a blog are great ways to do this.  So, for instance, you might provide an article on your website as to why you recommend ADT Security over other brands.

A good website is vital to your business, because it is often the biggest factor in a customer’s decision to buy from you, rather than someone else.  You are best off hiring an experienced content writer, but if you can’t or won’t, by following these tips you should at least be able to write web pages that won’t embarrass you!

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