Ten Reasons Why You Shouldn't Write Your Website Like Your

Even nowadays, too many companies are essentially cutting up
their printed brochures and pasting them online as the prime
content for their website. It seems like the cheap and easy
option - but actually it's the very expensive one, and it will
cost them countless customers and almost guarantee low search
engine rankings. Here are the main reasons why you need to
create content for your website from scratch - and not recycle
existing print copy.

1. Your brochure is primarily aimed at one audience -
customers. Your website is aimed at two - customers and search
engines. People read text online quite differently from the way
they read printed materials. They scan much more, for one thing.

2. Print copy often contains a lot of puffery phrases like 'our
service is second to none'. 'Service' is a stop word with some
search engines and will be ignored in a search query. And how
many people use phrases like 'second to none' in a search?

3. Your brochure is a fixed and rigid entity. You might reprint
it every couple of years, but essentially it's an unchanging
unit of 4, 8, 12 or whatever pages. You can do roll-folds, print
it on glossy paper or write it upside down in Esperanto if you
want, but once it's done it's done. Your website can not only
change, it should - and frequently.

4. Your website can certainly reflect your brochure. But it also
has to act as your sales letter, your shop window, your
receptionist, your storeroom, your sales assistant, your
despatch department, your PR department, your think-tank, your
newsletter, your press ad, your poster, your helpline and...you
name it.

5. Does your brochure have one to three keywords per page,
repeated an optimum number of times and in the right places? Of
course not - one of the main reasons why your website should be
treated separately.

6. Is your brochure written in such a way that anyone can pick
it up and read any page and without even looking at the front
cover, let alone the index, find what they're looking for?
Remember, a visitor can arrive on any page of your website. They
should know what you're about straightaway - and if the page has
been optimised well, there's a good chance visitors will find
what they're looking for at once.

7. Good print copy is clear, concise and broken up into short
sentences and paragraphs, with easy to read headlines and
subheads. This applies in spades to website copy, which readers
scan even more than they would a printed page.

8. A brochure can be put in a briefcase, in-tray or just left on
a shelf or table for perusing at leisure. With a website you
have only seconds to gain interest and retention.

9. How do your customers obtain their brochures? Are they handed
over by a salesperson or distributed at exhibitions? Sent out
with a covering letter? Unless the visitor has been personally
directed to your website, chances are he or she is viewing it
cold, with nothing to back it up. This needs to be taken into
consideration when writing it.

10. Need more information? Like to view our other products? Want
to contact us? Looking for testimonials? With a website, all
these questions can be answered with a single click, and the
copy should always be written with that in mind. Remember, you
can't click on a printed brochure.

So never just stick your brochure online and hope - you'll be
disappointed every time. Write your website from scratch. Better
still, get a professional like me to write it. I can also handle
your brochure writing, if you happen to need a brochure writer.
But I promise the content of each will be very different.

Peter Wise is an advertising copywriter, website copywriter and
SEO copywriter based in London, UK. He also writes direct mail,
brochures, newsletter articles and press releases. You can reach
him at +44 (0) 7767 687524. For further information, please
visit http://ideaswise.com/