What are Website Copywriting Services and Do You Need Them?
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Your website copy is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. The words you use to describe your business impact your customers’ perception of your brand, your conversion rate, and your ability to rank in search engines.
The best websites answer potential customers’ questions as quickly and succinctly as possible, while providing a compelling pitch for your products or services and showcasing everything that sets your brand apart from the competition.
When designing (or re-designing) your website, hiring a professional website copywriter can make the difference between a website that communicates exactly who you and what you do and one that confuses and frustrates your audience — not to mention launching on-time and launching six months late.
What’s it Like to Work with a Professional Website Copywriter?
Many boutique web design agencies or solo website designers don’t provide copywriting services. They expect you to write the copy yourself or hire a website copywriter. They often require the copy to be finalized before any web design work begins.
A typical website content writing engagement includes the following steps:
Step 1: Free Consultation
You chat for 15 minutes with the writer to determine if you’re a good fit to work together, get aligned on the process, and get answers to any questions you have.
Step 2: Proposal & Deposit Invoice
The writer sends a proposal with the fee, scope of work, and terms of the engagement, along with the invoice for half of the project fee as a nonrefundable deposit. At this point, the writer may also recommend a Brand Identity engagement or an SEO strategy engagement before getting started with your website, depending on your situation.
Step 3: Deep Dive Interview
A writer can only create effective website copy if they start with a deep understanding of your audience. During a Deep Dive Interview with your team, the writer aims learn as much as they can about your target audience. What industries do you serve? What are the job titles of your best customers? Who makes the decisions about buying a product or service like yours, and are those the same people who are likely to do the research? What are their pain points?
Once they understand your customers, the writer will dig into how you help them. What are your key products or services, what are the problems they solve, what’s your unique selling proposition, and what are the differentiators for your company?
Lastly, they’ll also get to know who you are as a company. What are your core values, what’s your founder story, what’s the personality of your brand?
Step 4: Follow-Up Interview
After beginning to draft your content, the writer may need to schedule a follow-up interview to go into more detail on anything not covered in the first interview.
Step 5: Conceptual Wireframe & Sitewide SEO Recommendations (If Needed)
Depending on whether your brought a wireframe to the engagement or not, the writer may make recommendations about the layout of your site to improve user experience and give it a better chance of ranking higher in search engines for key buying-related search terms.
Step 6: First Draft of Website Content
The writer will provide the first draft of your website copy in a Google or Word Doc with high-quality copy for each web page, calling out formatting considerations (H1, H2, H3, bulleted list, hero section, CTA button, etc.).
Step 7: Revisions
After your team reviews the copy and provides line edits, the writer will typically provide up to three more revised versions (within 30 days of submitting the first draft) to make sure it perfectly captures your value proposition and your brand voice.
Step 8: Final Invoice
After submitting the final version of your website copy, the writer sends the invoice for the remaining balance.
With your finalized website copy in hand, you can then proceed with your website redesign project.
What’s the Typical Pricing for a Website Copy Project?
Writing website copy is a labor-intensive process that involves a lot more fine-tuning of word choice than just writing a blog post. And unless you’re working with a writer who already knows your business inside and out, the writer will need to factor in a significant amount of time for research into your brand and your industry.
A typical pricing structure for a professional website copywriter is based on the number of pages of copy. For example, I charge $1,000 for the first page, and then $500 for each additional page after that.
What’s the Typical Turnaround Time for Website Copy?
A typical website copy project, which includes anywhere from five to 15 unique urls’ worth of high quality content, takes a minimum of one month from the first consultation to the final round of revisions. This factors in about two weeks between the first deep dive interview and the first draft.
If you need website copy faster, you may be able to ask for rushed services. When I have the capacity to take on a rush project, I charge a 20% rush fee to provide the first draft within one week.
Is it Worth Hiring a Professional Website Copywriter?
A good copywriter brings more than just wordsmithing skills to your website project. They combine SEO best practices with sharp messaging to make sure your site gets found and converts visitors into customers. They offer an outsider’s perspective that can often articulate your value more clearly than you can yourself. And perhaps most importantly, when you hire a pro, the work actually gets done—on a deadline. No more letting “write the website copy” gather dust on your to-do list while your launch date slips further away. A professional ensures your site not only sounds great, but drives real business results, faster.
What Do I Need to Bring for a Smooth Website Copy Process?
My typical client comes to me to write the second, third, or even fourth iteration of their website, after they’ve been in business for a few years and have already figured out the basics about their value proposition. That’s typically when it’s worth investing in professional copywriting for your website, whereas when you’re first starting out, you might not understand your own customers enough to make it worth outsourcing the writing. I can work with you regardless of where you are in your journey, but there are a few marketing assets that can speed along the process.
Required: Brand Identity
Your brand identity is everything from your brand colors, to your essential copy describing your business, like your elevator pitch, boilerplate content, about us, social media tagline, etc. I’ll incorporate that into the copy of each web page as appropriate. If you have some of that, but don’t love it, I’ll suggest changes. And if you have nothing, I’ll recommend a Brand Identity project first.
Optional: Wireframe
It’s an age-old dilemma in building websites. Which comes first, the web design or the content? It’s kind of like the chicken and the egg, because you need both at the same time. Fortunately, I’m flexible.
If you don’t have a wireframe (any kind of mockup of the content showing the layout of the pages and a suggested character count for each section), I can help you brainstorm a website layout that makes sense, and write the copy first. Then the website designer can build a design that accommodates the copy.
If you already have a wireframe, I can write copy to fit within the designated spaces. However, be prepared for me to suggest changes to the design when it doesn’t fit the purpose of the page. I often run into situations where the designated text boxes don’t allow enough room for the kind of copy the page needs, or the design includes too many text boxes, and filling each one would just cloud the message. These kinds of changes are usually easy for web designers to incorporate.
Nice to Have: Style Guide
If you already have a style guide, that’s great, I’ll be able to more quickly learn your brand voice. If you don’t, no problem — but it’s something I can definitely help you put together in the future.
Where Does SEO Fit Into Website Copywriting?
When you’re creating the foundational copy for your website (home page, about us, FAQs, contact us, our approach, etc.), SEO optimization shouldn’t be your top priority. No one is searching “about [your company name]” so you don’t need SEO optimization for your “about us” page, even though that’s a very important page that will get a lot of traffic from people who have already found your website and are trying to decide if you’re a trustworthy company. Where SEO does matter, however, is your services page(s).
A professional website copywriter who is also an SEO strategist will make recommendations during the website copywriting process about the structure of your site to set you up for SEO success in the future. For example, many people will put all of their services in a list on one Services page. However, this isn’t great for SEO.
Following today’s SEO best practices, you need to have a dedicated page for each keyword cluster you want to rank for. And for most businesses, each of their services would represent a different keyword cluster.
In most cases, it’s best to have a services page in the main menu, and a drop down menu linking to each service you offer. This gives you the opportunity to make each one of those pages the best possible result on the entire internet for someone searching for that service.
For example: a roofing company could break its services into the following three unique pages:
Residential roofing
Commercial roofing
Solar panel installation
…instead of putting all of that info onto one “services” page. Breaking up the info allows each page to precisely target the search intent of people looking for each of those services.
During a website copywriting engagement, you should aim to optimize your services pages to rank for the most valuable search terms related to those services. The rest of your pages can be written without SEO optimization.
If you want your website to rank in search engines for more than three or four keywords, you’ll need to plan to create dozens of blog posts. It’s a long-term strategy that is best tackled through a month-to-month retainer, rather than trying to crank out five or ten articles at once during the initial website copy engagement. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO optimized blog posts, check out my SEO content writing service.
Streamline Your Website Project with Professional Copywriting Support
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