Website homepage content writing cheat sheet

Your website’s homepage is the most visited on your website.

A website homepage has the hardest job to do on your website:

• Informing people what it is you do
• What they can expect to find on your website
• Most importantly, directing people to where they want to be on your website

If your website content sucks then customers will assume your business does too. No one wants to buy from a business that’s lame. Simple.

Your website has under 5 seconds to get someone to stay on your website. And what is it on your website that helps them decide to stay or go? That’s right, your content.

The best website content out there is solely focused on speaking to your customer and their needs. This is why you must focus on quality over quantity.

There’s art and science behind content, so make sure you think about how your content looks on your website not only how it sounds.

Priority number one when writing website content is to write to your target customer as if you’re chatting to them in a room.

The process to writing website content is a little more complex.

It’s highly recommended that you read this blog from our senior copywriter ‘How to write website content‘ before you get to work and use this template/cheat sheet.

Here’s a quick overview of the steps on how to write web content:

• Create or use your customer personas to plan exactly what it is you need to write about.
• Decide on the pages to write.
• Then work out why your customer wants to read this content and what’s in it for them – your product or service hopefully!
• Do you research – SEO keyword research, see what your competitors have written and talk to customers if you have the chance.
• Write up your first draft.
• Read the content back and edit it.

We call it SEO content. It isn’t just any old content thrown together on a topic, it needs to be written around a set of priority keywords that have been identified as popular and relevant for the chosen subject(s) of your content.

Those keywords must be carefully weaved into the content and structured in a way that lets the search engines know what the content is about and what the most important elements are.

If you want to reap the benefits of soaring up the Google ranks thanks to your SEO performance, you’ll need to become very familiar with SEO content and how to create the good stuff.

Search engines look at millions of websites daily (aka ‘crawling’) in order to find the best content for each search term. When crawling the sites, they look at the content of each page to determine how relevant they are for terms mentioned within the content.

A page of website content from a professional copywriter would usually cost anywhere between £120 – £250. For a small business this is usually out of budget.

This cheat sheet is an affordable option for you to write content for your website’s homepage and do a good job.

You need to keep your homepage content short and to the point. Make sure that you use headings and that those headings really get your key messages across.

In terms of what to actually write, think about your customers and what they need from you. And match that with what your unique selling point is as a business.

Now run free and get creative!

That’s the best thing about this template – it gives you the chance to sit and think before just writing.