Making a good impression is important for any business, however it’s especially important for martial arts businesses. Whilst having a great design certainly helps to make a good first impression, it’s important that this is accompanied by original and varied content. Not only can this help you increase your conversion rates, but it can also help you rank higher in search engine results! Check out our top 5 tips on writing copy for your website:
5 Tips to Writing Content for your Website
1. Keep it Original and Varied
One thing I’ve noticed about the martial artists I have met is that they love chatting, sharing experiences and helping people. Using this personable approach to influence your writing style can help your personality shine through. This invariably makes your copy more engaging and interesting, which can help encourage visitors to stay on your website and book a trial lesson.
Remember though, try to keep your content varied and interesting (to the reader). It’s important to find the line between including the usual information and detail the reader wants to know and copying what someone else has included because it looks or sounds good. Really, no matter how good someone else’s website is, don’t copy it – better it!
Write your own original copy by doing research, getting inspiration and letting your enthusiasm and personality shine through to what you are writing.
2. Use Keywords
Before you can start including keywords and phrases into your copy, it’s important to research and find out what they are. There are many different keywords you can target but as this industry is about offering local services to local people, try to focus on location types and styles.
For example:
Location type: “martial arts Nottingham”
Styles: “karate classes”
The tricky part when choosing keywords is striking the balance between words/phrases that get lots of searches, but that you can also compete for. If the word/phrase is too specific then there won’t be enough people searching for it, so there’s no point in ranking well for it, but if it’s too competitive you won’t rank/feature at all. Whilst it’s important to keep your keywords/phrases relevant to what you do and offer, try to think about what someone new to martial arts may search for.
There are many tools available that can help you identify keywords/phrases including:
www.google.co.uk/adwords
www.adwords.google.co.uk/KeywordPlanner
www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords
Once you have established this, it’s time to begin writing! The most important thing when including keywords in your website copy is that they sound natural. Not only is this important for user experience, but the increasing ability of search engines to identify keyword stuffing on webpages makes this a dangerous activity, which if found can lead to penalisation in search engine results.
If done in the right way, the identification and use of these keywords will help to improve your search results listing.
3. Check Spelling and Grammar
There is a strong correlation between webpages with spelling errors and poor search engine ranking. Whether this is a direct ranking factor is yet to be determined, however it’s safe to say that content with spelling and grammar errors is of a lower quality than content that is spelt and written well. Think of it like this…
Why would search engines show a page with lots of spelling and grammar errors when other pages without these errors are available?
So, to summarise when you write your website content, it needs to be easy to understand, simple to read and have great spelling and grammar. If spelling and grammar isn’t your strong point, don’t worry. Write your content using a word processing application such as Google Docs or Microsoft Word and use their spell checking tool before you add the content to your website
4. Structure your Pages
Many people scan read articles and websites looking for certain information or something that jumps out at them, before stopping to read the whole thing. To help encourage visitors to stay on your website, try to structure all your pages using:
– Headings
– Subheadings
– Paragraphs
– Short Sentences
– Bullet Points
You can emphasise points on each page by using the font colour, highlight colour, bold, italics or underline options to help them stand out.
5. Make it Interesting
Last but not least, make it interesting! This may be easier said than done, but as long as you remember to write content for your target audience, rather than yourself and steer away from jargon and technical terms, you’ll already be part way there. For martial arts schools, it’s a great idea to approach this from a benefit led perspective. Using your content to show visitors the benefits they can expect to experience by participating in martial arts is immediately interesting and should help encourage visitors to book a trial lesson or come to class.
For more information on writing copy for websites, call NEST on 0115 945 5030 or email marketing@nestmanagement.co.uk and someone will be happy to help.
