Website Copy: The Case Against a Minimalist Approach
Image Credit: Death to Stock
It is probably apparent when clicking through my website that I’m not afraid of writing a lot of copy. This is not a popular opinion among user experience and website designers, as a user tends to lose interest quickly and avoids copy-dense pages. I’m not here to dispute that, as I do believe that’s a true occurrence statistically speaking. However, I’m here to build a case FOR a copy-heavy website because, at the end of the day, whether you use a lot of copy or not is a subjective decision (sorry UX researchers and statisticians).
Educate & Build Trust
A picture might be worth a thousand words, but I highly doubt a picture can explain the difference between UX and UI, and why they’re often presented together with a slash between them. Sometimes it’s ok to get detailed about what you do and why you do it, and it takes more than a few sentences to do so effectively. By providing extra information up front, your potential clients perusing your website will already understand the nuances of your service offerings before they reach out. This increases transparency, builds trust and decreases time spent selling and educating your clients once they sign on.
Create Value & Improve Image
The act of educating your clients about your services, including your philosophies and some best-practice tips, not only helps you, but this information can help your potential clients, even if they end up working with someone else. Why is this a good thing? By providing helpful information to someone shopping around in your industry, you provide them with tools to find a company that best fits their needs, even if it’s not you. This can improve your image, present you as a thought-leader worth listening to, and increase the chances this person will refer you to someone else, if not reach out themselves in the future. Giving away free intellectual content only improves your image, and the image of your industry (you’re welcome other designers!). This often takes a bit of writing to do a thorough job in an authentic and genuine manner, so don’t hold back.
Improve SEO
The more thorough you are when describing your services and their benefits, the greater the chances you’ll show up higher in search results. Though it’s good to note that this takes time. With this in mind, focusing on the keywords you know have improved search results within your industry are ideal to use on your main website pages when you initially launch your website. These are the pages you won’t update regularly, meaning they’re the foundation of your SEO efforts. Writing blogs regularly and posting them to your social platforms is a wonderful content marketing strategy, but Google isn’t going to count those the same as your main service pages. Be thorough, don’t over-use keywords and speak authentically, and your main website pages will do some big SEO work for you long-term.
Reading Won’t Kill Anyone
If I’m looking for a product or service, I do the research to find the best value, not just the best price. I look for and learn about people and things that I want to support and that I know will support me. It helps avoid adding unnecessary drama and toxicity into my life, both emotional and environmental. I’m not sure when exactly we began to feel too impatient to sit quietly and assimilate language to improve our own lives and the lives of others. Maybe when the app masters hijacked our attention spans by addicting us to aimless image scrolling? But this supposed lack of patience UX researchers have discovered isn’t a good enough reason for me to avoid providing you with a smorgasbord of tasty words to chew on. Anything worth investing in is worth learning about up front so you know what you’re actually paying for. And learning involves reading and comprehending the text requires time.
