8 mistakes made when writing web content and how to solve them

11 min readSep 3, 2020

Even if your business is perfectly organized and super productive, the difference between winning or losing a customer can be very small, such as the text on your website.

Quality web content is what attracts visitors to your site, convinces them that you (or your products) will do the job for them, and turns them into customers. However, how can you be sure that your texts guide visitors and help them find answers to the questions that led them to your website?

1. It is not clear who is your target audience

Useful and interesting content generally does not exist. There is information that is interesting and useful for a specific group of people. You can only give your potential customers answers if you know what they are asking for. You can offer them a solution if you know what their problems are. What is the reason for this mistake?

Many people do not know who they are writing for and the most common reasons for this are:

the desire to please everyone so as not to miss a client
make the lyrics the way they like it, not their customers
they still don’t know their audience well and shoot in all directions.

How to fix it?

Gather the maximum amount of information for your current and potential customers. Use Google Analytics, surveys, talk to people. The main questions you need to answer are:

what are your customers by gender and age
what is their way of life
what resources they have
what are their values
what are their interests
how they speak
how familiar they are with the product/service you offer
what problem your product/service can solve for them

Seek and answer additional questions tailored to the specifics of the field in which your business is. Once you have all the information, make Persona analysis — this is a collective image of your client. If your products/services are aimed at several groups of customers, make a Persona for each one. As you work on them, and then as you watch them, you will come up with a bunch of good ideas of what content to offer your customers, what language and tone of communication to use, how long the texts should be, how they should be structured and formatted, where to place accents.

2. The main message is lost…

“Dear customers, welcome to our website!
We would like to present you our products, which we hope will contribute to your good mood! If you wish, you can look at… “

Can you find out from this text what they offer you? No, right? You will close the page before you reach the dot.

What is the reason behind this mistake?

The people behind the scenes fear that they might “scare” potential customers. And they don’t want to seem too insistent on selling something.
Desire to look authoritative, polite, and inspire confidence — this is especially true for businesses in the financial and insurance sectors, for example.

Solution :
It is important to know how people read on the Internet. They fly through the text, they might stop on the title, 1–2 subheadings, and possibly individual sentences. If during this 3 to 5-second review they do not see at least a hint that they will find what they are looking for, they will close the page and open another one. Share with your potential customers what is really important to them — how you can help them.

Write concisely, specifically, clearly, directly on the topic. If you offer freshly baked cakes by exotic recipes, let this be the first thing that visitors to your website see and learn. If you know how to get rid of the cockroaches at home, tell them right away — people have a problem and are looking for a way to solve it, unnecessary courtesies irritate them.

It is good to keep in mind the following — the first 2 things that the visitor should be informed at a glance, regardless of which page of your site they come across are:

⚡ what is this place and where it is located — online store, company site, site for jokes, portfolio, etc.

⚡ where the user can find the information that he/she is looking for

3. Excessive originality

Buttons with crazy names. Many elements in different colors that move, blink, make sounds. Three different fonts within a paragraph. Links that lead to “nowhere”. All this makes the visitor press the X in the upper right corner.

What is the reason for this mistake?

Desire to be original to attract attention.

Solution:

When it comes to web content, excessive creativity can repel potential customers if it is not in the right direction. Customers often ask me to come up with more original names for their buttons. “Why to use “For Us” - it’s banal?” In this case, banality is the best thing that can happen to you. Precisely because of the speed with which it “flies” through the page, one seeks to hang on to familiar things. When he wants to know more about your company, he looks for the “About Us” or “About the Company” button. When searching for product-specific information, it searches for a “Products” button and/or a button with the name of the product itself. If he doesn’t see them, he closes your site and rushes to the next one. He won’t waste a second thinking about what’s behind the “Interesting” or “Try something new” button. Most people do not click on buttons and links at all, which do not suggest clearly enough what can be seen/read after a person clicks on them.

Keep this in mind when naming different sections of the website and when putting links in the text.

4. Unclear benefits for visitors

Visits to your website are not many, and even if they are, visitors view your great products and close the page. You are wondering what is wrong, even though you have listed all the improvements and extras of the product…That’s it — brag instead of being useful.

What is the reason?

Ignorance of the target group you are writing for.
Confidence that if the product boasts, it will sell itself.
Insufficient knowledge of the described products and services.

Solution:
Review the characters you’ve made again. Make sure you know the desires and needs of your audience well. Imagine that each person tells you their problem and asks how you can help them. Rewrite the text so that you respond to it.

Get to know the products/services you write about as much as possible. If you do not produce them, but only sell — test them in advance, ask experts, do your research without relying solely on Internet sources.

Use the language of your audience to explain each benefit of the product. Let the technical specifications come as proof of your claims.

For example, write a product description of a sleeping bag and say that it is made of goose down, treated with hydro barrier technology. Its outer fabric is denier ripstop, and the inner — super soft mini-ripstop. With such a text you have no chance to intrigue anyone other than a very avid mountaineer, who is very “you” with all the innovations in equipment. Agree, so the group of potential customers narrows significantly, without the need.

You will attract many more visitors and you will be able to turn them into customers if you explain that the bag will keep them warm even in winter, in the lower parts of the mountain, because it is made of goose down. That it will stay dry because of the technology it is treated with. That there is no need to worry about exactly where they will lay him, because his outer tissue is waterproof, strong, and difficult to tear, and the inner keeps moisture away from the body.

5. Lack of calls to action

Wondering why you don’t have subscriptions or sales when your site has enough visitors, the information is useful, well-structured, and well-designed. Well, you have no calls to action and the subscription/purchase button is small and placed in a not very suitable place, but this should not be a problem, everything else is perfect.

What is the cause of this problem?

It seems too rude or rude to tell your site visitors what you want them to do.
Tired of screaming ads, buttons, and calls to action — you want your site to be different.
It never occurred to you that there should be calls for action and you didn’t think that the button might be small or in the wrong place.

Solution:
Use more verbs. Make calls for action where needed. Make sure your buttons are visible, in bright colors, without distracting details around and with a clear message on the button itself what action the customer will take if he presses it. For longer content — 2–3 screens — it is recommended that the button appears in front of the visitor 2–3 times.

Fight for the attention, time, and money of your potential customers in an environment full of online temptations. Do not underestimate the possible, distracting, offline factors. Even if they have found the information they are looking for, even if you have won their trust, even if they are ready to perform the desired action — to make a purchase, for example — you can still lose your customers. Position the buttons so that they are in front of your eyes when they feel like clicking on them. Don’t let your potential customers waste this momentum in scrolling.

Use well-written calls to action and you will not sound impudent and rude, but on the contrary — like people who want to help. Tell your visitors what you want them to do and remind them in a few words how it will help them.

For example, if you insist on subscribing to your newsletter, explain to them what they will gain from it. I use the following two arguments:

Subscribe
You get access to a free beginner copywriting course and each new article arrives directly in your mail.
The initial version:
Subscribe
You will be more comfortable.

You probably have another reason why visitors to your site should subscribe to your newsletter. To be the first to learn important news for their business or health. To be able to take advantage of special discounts. Tell them what they will gain if they do what you tell them and I assure you, they will not think that you sound rude and impudent or that you press them too hard.

6. Inappropriate structuring and layout of the text

At school, we are taught that texts have the following structure: introduction, thesis, exposition, and conclusion. Many people use it when creating content for their sites. The problem is that it doesn’t work at all when reading through the page.

Solution:
Web texts should have an inverted pyramid structure — you start directly with the most important and go to the least important. Thus, the probability of attracting and retaining the attention of visitors increases enormously. With this and the ability to make them read carefully all or almost all of the content and turn them into customers. That’s why accurate titles and subheadings are key to the effectiveness of your text. When formulating them, you should keep in mind the following things:

the way visitors “read” — the titles should suggest what the text is about, ie. be clear and specific;
how to search — a lot of people still write whole questions in search engines, as if asking a human being, and waiting for an answer
the titles and subheadings are like some kind of map on which the visitor glances to see if it will take him to the desired treasure.

In order not to frighten his eye, it is best to divide the text into paragraphs and use bullets. Refrain from sentences that are too long and use punctuation marks correctly — they make it easier to read and help clarify the meaning of the text.

Each page of the website has mandatory elements. It is good to know who they are in order to decide how to place them, whether you can get rid of some of them, and how this will help you achieve your goal. I also recommend that you learn the specifics of bullet layout, centering, and alignment of the text, the use of colors and fonts. The rules are not many, but they are essential for the way your site visitors find and perceive the information.

7. Lack of enough useful information, stuffing

Everything meaningful that you can tell your visitors is collected in half to a full page of text. However, you have blurred it among a stream of parasitic words and insignificant phrases and you have tried to say it in several different ways, ie. you have repeated it at least 3–4 times.

Visitors are respected if the text is in good layout, but quickly find that they are wasting their time and close the page.

The cause

You have heard from an SEO specialist that it is mandatory to have at least 1000 words of text on each page in order to rank ahead in the search engines.
The author of the text has not been able to formulate his thoughts clearly enough, nor to clothe them in the appropriate words.
Underestimating the audience, fear that they will not understand what is being explained to them — this is especially for repeating the same thing in a different way.
Insufficient knowledge of the topic.
The author was given the task of writing a text of a certain volume and wondered how to achieve it with so little information.

Solution:
If the useful information you have fits in a text of 500 words, do not try to write a text of 1000–1500 words. Stretching delicacies is much worse for SEO than short and meaningful texts, and it also repels visitors to your site.

Do a thorough preliminary study of the topic you are writing about and your audience (what is the language of your clients — specialized, in terms, slang, extremely simple).

Edit until you have trimmed everything unnecessary and give the text to at least one bystander to read before uploading.

8. Having too many adjectives, and still not specific enough

Unique, superb, perfect, original, unforgettable products or services that bring a unique, superb, perfect, original, unforgettable experience can be really good, but most visitors to your site they will not understand this. They just won’t bother to test them.