Several years ago while managing a small airline I engaged the services of a website designer to get our business online with the purpose of raising the profile and generating more business. The designer asked for photos and made suggestions on what the site could do and how it would look. It all sounded fantastic and we were sold on it. He then asked us to provide the copy for the various pages we wanted. So taking our standard marketing material from brochures and magazine articles, the team in the office put together what we thought was some pretty slick web copy and sent it off to the web designer. A few weeks later the site was up and running, it looked great and we all felt good about it.
"That's it", we thought "we're online, we're happy". We started a PPC ad campaign still thinking we were on track. It was not until some time later that I learned about 'key words', 'key phrases' and word optimization while delving into uncharted waters of creating my own website. Once I kissed this most simple of theories, but certainly not the easiest to write, I was stunned at the level of ignorance I had operated under a few years ago. The thing that bothered me even more was how butly inept our web designer had been getting the basics right. Not once did he mention anything about the direct relationship between key words and the content on a page, let alone the value of marrying the two together.
I was reminded of this just the other day when a friend of mine introduced me to his web designer to show off his site currently under construction. The designer knew the computer engineering lingo and could do magical things with a site in terms of its appearance and ease of navigation, etc. Then as we were leaving he yelled out to my friend, "Do not forget to send me your copy John". "Here we go again", I thought. "Same movie, different actors". I asked the designer if he was going to re-write the copy himself for the purpose of optimization. What ensued was a mild argument which resulted in his credentials being shredded in the eyes of his client, my friend. The standard practices of marketing and advertorial copy writing are thrown out the window when writing copy for a website.
It takes a writer who is not only skilled in the creative aspects of copy writing, but who understands the fundamentals of writing website content to drive business to your site and achieves those all important high Google Quality Scores. Good quality web copy that is key word rich has to appear seamless but still have a creative edge to it. Aside from creative copy, the three intertwined key elements for writing web copy are the relationship between your Ad, your key words and key phrases, and the landing page a particular ad direct visitors to. Getting all of those ingredients performing to potential is a specialty job for a website copy writer. It's no myth that a good web content writer is a must. Just make sure your web designer is aware of that too.