Website copywriting can be difficult if you aren’t a natural-born writer. You know your products well and know what needs to be emphasized … but sometimes it just doesn’t come out properly! These tips for improving your website content (and therefore, web marketing) can be applied after the fact, and do not include any advice about taking writing classes!
Cut out the ‘be’s
Okay, you won’t be able to remove all of the ‘be’s from your writing – but odds are, many of them are superfluous. Look at the sentence: “I will be putting these up on the website next week”. You can change that quickly and easily to “I will put these … etc”, and retain the same meaning.
Given the fact that conciseness is of paramount importance on the web, this and the next tip are more useful than you might think!
Cut out ‘is’s
Clunky heading, I know 
. Keep reading anyway. Often you can cut out ‘is’ from sentences quite easily, and chop out surrounding words along with this little seed of verbosity. You can either:
- Shorten your full ‘is’s to contractions – ‘what is’ to ‘what’s’. Roughly the same characters, but easier for people to grasp.
- Look for instances of ‘there is’, and rearrange the sentence to cut them out completely.
- Look for other ‘is’s, and think about whether you can use other words to shorten the sentence. It’s usually possible.
When it comes to facts, don’t generalise
Here is a handy cheat-sheet of words to help you identify whether you are generalising. If you say:
- Often
- Many
- Approximately
- Can (as opposed to will)
- Virtually
You are telling your audience there’s an exception to whatever you have just written. It’s like a legal loophole for getting out of having your product do what you implied it would. These aren’t forbidden words generally, but you shouldn’t use them when you are talking about facts.
Learn to love full stops
Any sentence that goes on for longer than 15-20 words is usually too long. Full stops are the best way to break up sentences, but not always possible. Use semicolons where you can, or simply cut out a part of the sentence that isn’t really necessary.