Web copywriting

I’ve been using Google Voice for a while now to record phone interviews for Web copywriting. Usually I’m capturing accurate quotations or how someone talks so I can ghost-write a blog post or first-person bio.  You have to have a Google account and get a unique Google Voice number so people can call you (not vice-versa) and Google can alert them when you start recording. The result is a no-frills list of your recordings on your Voicemail page that you can annotate to make an easily readable index. Fast forward and reverse in playback are kinda klunky, but you get used to it.

Google Voice interface – recorded call.

And Google Voice does a lot more than just record calls.

Every organization that publishes on the Web should use an editorial style guide approved by whoever is ultimately responsible for the quality of the organization’s content. No matter what size your business is or what business you’re in, an editorial style guide will:

• save you time and money by avoiding internal disputes about grammar, punctuation and spelling;
• help you make sure all your content (not just Web content) is consistent;
• improve the quality of your Web content—help you communicate more clearly and powerfully with site visitors.

Most organizations use either The Associated Press Stylebook or The Chicago Manual of Style (for more scholarly content). Many more editorial style guides are available for different industries, countries, professions, and media (check out this extensive list on Wikipedia). Savvy, mature organizations usually supplement a published guide such as the AP Stylebook with an “in-house” guide that covers spellings, punctuation and usage unique to their business or industry. Those internal guides should be regularly updated and approved as new editorial issues arise.

And please note that I’m talking about editorial style guides here, not graphic design style guides (fonts, color specifications, ‘look and feel’) etc. Editorial style guides should also avoid wading into ‘voice and tone’ requirements, branding issues, editorial workflows, personas, competitive analyses and other content development policies that are much more useful in higher-level content or marketing strategies developed for specific Web projects.

Consulting recently on a talent agency’s “skillmap” for copywriters, I said that good copy should be “jargon-free.” A colleague disagreed, said jargon “can often help establish rapport with a niche target audience,” especially in a situation where non-specialists are trying to show specialists they can ‘talk the talk’.

If you take most dictionary definitions of “jargon” literally, she’s right – jargon is useful and efficient for communication within exclusive groups, neither good nor bad in itself. And sometimes an outsider, if they’re really good, can get away with ‘talking the talk’. But far more often jargon is used to impress outsiders (“we’re in the know; you aren’t”) or feign insider status or expertise that the writer or speaker doesn’t have, so it narrows the audience and degrades into lingo that even the insiders don’t understand. Scott Berkun (one of my favorite thinkers about the digital realm) makes that point nicely in this blog post, “Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds”: http://scottberkun.com/2012/why-jargon-feeds-on-lazy-minds/.

Does the writing on your website make you feel drowsy, confused? Do you get headaches when you even think about improving it? Do you experience shortness of breath when you realize that the writing on your competitors’ sites is much more engaging, clear, concise, informative?

You need CONTENT PAIN RELIEF (CPR)™–now, before you lose more site visitors! Use this chart to get started…

CPR Diagnostic Chart

I used to see most writing, including Web copywriting, as a stack of cargo nets I fell through one after the other until I reached a level where I said what I really meant. Now I see it more like a slippery hill with a mud puddle at the bottom and I’m on a motocross bike trying to get up it, revving and spinning and charging and falling back, charging again, losing my balance, falling over, finally getting up and over. In other words, any writer worth his/her salt will tell you that writing is hard work that almost always gets better with each rewrite–always with a deadline firmly in mind. Here’s evidence of one acclaimed novelist’s muddy uphill struggle:

J. G. Ballard (British writer) manuscript page for “Crash” (1973)

Optimizing this site for search engines (SEO) yesterday, I was more aware than ever that I was changing my writing, often for the worse, so it would be easier for machines (i.e. Google) to understand. The application I used as my SEO adviser wanted me to:

• Repeat my main keyword for each page as much as possible on that page (good Web copywriting doesn’t repeat the same words too much—to avoid the semantic carry-over ‘baggage’ of each occurrence and keep readers nourished with fresh words).
• Use the main keyword in my page title and sub-heads  so search “bots” (robots) can more easily understand what the page or post is about  (good copywriting uses page titles and headlines or chapter titles to grab attention, intrigue readers, lead them into the writing that follows, not just matter-of-factly announce the main subject matter–boring!)
• Keep my sentences short, no matter what (good writing varies sentence length to keep readers singing along with the sounds and rhythms of easygoing human language)
• Avoid words with too many syllables, no matter what (good writing is precise, and sometimes a longer word packs a lot more, richer meaning per character and resonates more in your mind than a shorter, fuzzier one)
• Include as many outbound links as possible (good writing, and Web copywriting in particular, doesn’t distract you by frequently suggesting that you read something else)
• Avoid so-called “stop words”  in key words and page titles–words that make The Machine return too many results and/or too many irrelevant results.

“Stop words”

That last bit of advice about “stop words” really got me. “Consider removing them,” said the plug-in, sounding like Hal 9000, the rogue computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”). Here’s a snippet from just one of countless “stop word” lists:

And that’s just A through F… The list goes on. And many stop word lists are much longer. It’s hard to imagine any Web copywriter worth his/her salt willingly doing without ANY words!

Web copywriting SEO in a nutshell

Between the lines and looming large over even the geekiest professional SEO blogs and online forums, there’s a chronic ambivalence, a mixed message, between “Ignore the search engines, just create great, fresh content and you’ll rank high in search engine results”… and “You absolutely have to do [this] or [that] with your content and metadata and social networks” to get the best return on your SEO investment.The bottom line is that effective web copywriting SEO depends on:

• Creating interesting, useful content for a well defined audience–and update it regularly;
• Making sure your site is built on a platform that makes it easy for you to offer The Machines the right bait (URLs, page titles, headlines, keywords in copy, outbound links);
• Engaging with social media–going out to mingle and talk usefully with your people, making sure you’re not just babbling like SNL’s “Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party” and handing out links back to your site like unwanted business cards (word is out that The Machines really couldn’t care less about those lately…).

the long view

My take on the future of Web copywriting SEO?  I’m thinking that if and when we get to the point where computers can understand Web content without our having to dumb down and interpret our “natural” language for them (and we sure seem to be headed hell-bent-for-leather in that direction!) we’d better be way more prepared to tango with them than Dave is in Kubrick’s film.