 Welcome to Copywriting for the Web, today's best practices. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global where I help run these events on a weekly basis. And I'm happy to be your host today having kind of come from the content end of nonprofit life, having been a communications manager at the last organization I have worked for. And then moving to TechSoup seven years ago, I managed our content and blog and article channels and wrote most of the copy for our website. So I'm happy to have with us today Dahlia who I actually met many years ago when she came to TechSoup to do a training for our staff. So I'm really thrilled to have her expertise shared with all of you today. And so a little bit about Dahlia Masachi, our speaker for today. She's a writer since learning to hold a pencil and the founder of Writing for Community Success. She inspires and equips social sector professionals to use their writing to make a difference in their communities. She is an award-winning author of the 2011 book Writing to Make a Difference, 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact. She will be providing us with friendly practical insights into how to improve your web content and web copy. And as a former journalist, she now serves as the project manager, editor, and coach for many content marketers as they boost their visibility and market position. And so we're happy to have her joining us. And you can learn more about her work at WritingToMakeADifference.com. We'll talk a little bit more about that later, and she'll also talk about it in her introduction. And you can see her in action on YouTube. So thanks so much for joining us today. You'll also see on the back end chatting out to you and collecting your questions throughout the webinar, Allie Bezdikian, who is TechSoup's Interactive Events and Video Producer. And she will be on hand to help make sure that if you have technical issues, need help, or just have questions you want to share, she'll be there to help handle those. So we are here, all of us actually, Dali included, are in the San Francisco Bay Area. Go ahead and chime in and let us know where you're joining from today. We often have people from all over the world participating in our events. And so we've got folks chiming in that they're in New York, Ohio, San Francisco, Seattle, Michigan, Minneapolis, Denver, LA, Norfolk, Virginia, Vermont. It's going so fast. It's hard to keep track. Ontario, South Dakota, Illinois, Florida, Colorado, Maryland, Texas. It is like a little wheel spinning. And we know that you can't see the comments that are coming into chat from the fellow participants out there. So if there are tips or experiences that we think are useful to share back out with you, we'll be sure to do that. So let us know if you have experiences you want to share with the rest of the audience and we can get those back out to everybody to read. A look at today's agenda, I'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup for those of you who may not be familiar with us. We'll have a couple of minutes where we can hear from you, our participants on today's event, about your experience in writing copy and your role in frequency of publishing. Then we'll launch into Dalia's portion where she'll talk about why web copy is important, give us three keys to planning, talk a little bit about the trends with today's web users and what they are expecting, share some tips on usability and accessibility, give an introduction to SEO, and then we'll have some time in this 90-minute webinar today where we will look live at a bunch of websites from those of you who registered and expressed interest in having your site reviewed live online. We'll be looking at a few of those today together where she'll share some examples of great copy and some examples of where maybe copy could be improved. And we'll have time for Q&A, had a couple of points throughout, and also at the end. So TechSoup Global is a nonprofit network of 63 partner NGOs serving 121 countries around the world. We are a nonprofit and we are working to help you as a nonprofit, library, or social benefit organization better serve your mission with technology, resources, and knowledge. You can learn about our work in our 2014 year in review which I'm proud to be a part of. And before I joined TechSoup, I was a beneficiary of the programs at three small nonprofits that I worked for in Oakland and California and Washington, D.C. So I appreciate the work that we do kind of from both perspectives and I'm glad to be your host. You can see around the world where we have either countries that we are serving with our donation programs, or net-squared local groups where you can meet up. We've served organizations to the tune of 615,000 NGOs worldwide that we've reached with our programs to nearly saving them $5 billion in expenses with products and grant donations. You can learn more about our programs at TechSoup.org. For those of you who are trying to click the links on the screen, you won't be able to do that live during the webinar. So I noticed a comment saying the year in review link doesn't work. It should work in the actual slide deck. So if you don't have it on hand, you will get that later today in that follow-up email and you can check it out at that point. So go ahead and chime in now, the participants we have on the line. How long have you been writing copy for the web? Zero to six months, a few years, more than five years, maybe something in the middle, or go ahead and let us know if there's some other thing you'd like to mention in the chat. We have right now about 130 people online, but that's sure to continue climbing in the next few minutes. I'm going to give everybody an opportunity to chime in. And Janet comments, eight months came from the for-profit marketing world. So marketing copy is somewhat different sometimes than the copy you may be writing for a nonprofit. And sometimes those skills are often crisscrossing too. And some people are chiming in one year. We don't actually have that as an option on the screen. I'll give just a few more seconds for everybody to click on one of those buttons. And I will show the results here. And it looks like around 37% are pretty new to writing copy for the web. And then the other two-thirds are either a few years or more than five years. So we've got a pretty broad spread of experience here on the line with us. And a couple more questions just to help us get an idea of where you're at. Are you currently involved in the decision making for web copy? Are you the person who actually implements the web copy changes? Are you doing both of those things? You're deciding and you're actually publishing and editing the site? Or are you doing neither? And maybe you're just kind of in a supervisory role or maybe you are on the opposite end of that spectrum and hoping to help do that? Go ahead and let us know sort of what your role is. A lot of people chiming in in the chat that they do both. And we also see that majority of the people in the poll are also doing both. I'm going to show those results right now. You can continue voting though too. So nearly 74% are doing both of those things in decision making and implementing. That's great. And Laura comments in chat that they would like to make suggestions for copy. Go ahead and let us know when was the last time you made updates to your web copy? Are you updating weekly, daily? We don't have daily as an option on here, but at least this week within the last week are you doing it maybe every couple of months? Or are you doing it less frequently, maybe three months or more? And again this just helps give us as your facilitator and presenter today some idea of how hands-on you are with this work and how much experience you have that might help change a little bit about the approach that we take with some of the content that's covered. Julie comments in chat that they are currently redesigning their website. And I know that process having gone through it a few times myself involves a lot of rewriting and a lot of content creation. Dan comments, I'm in the process of implementing a new website, so not that frequent on this one. If you are in the middle of it you may not be making updates daily or weekly right now, but you may be very soon as far as the copy for your new website. A lot of that will probably be refreshed in the process. I'm going to show the results here. The majority of people on the line have updated within the past week. So regular updates seem to be the norm with most of the folks on this group. So with that I would like to go ahead and have our expert presenter of the day join us on the line to talk to us about web copywriting and give us some of those best practices. Take us through the thought processes, the techniques, and the steps to help us all improve how we write. And I'm excited for this too because I still write quite a bit of web copy myself. And every time I've heard Dahlia speak I always come away learning something. So thank you so much for joining us today Dahlia. Welcome to the program. Dahlia Thank you so much Becky. I'm really pleased to be here today. And it sounds like people are really active with their websites which is great. I'm excited about that. I love to hear that people are updating their websites frequently and it's good to know that we've got a wide range of experience here. People new to it, but also people who've been doing it for a while. I also found that very interesting that we have the majority of people who are both deciding what to put on the web and implementing those decisions. So that will be great to get lots of interaction and information today. Now I'm a pretty interactive presenter so I'm going to ask you all to really stick with me. Be very present because I'm going to be asking you to type in stuff at various points. Okay, so just a bit about my background. Becky already shared and I just wanted to kind of visually let you know about my work in the nonprofit sector for over 20 years. And not only do I do websites, but I do lots of other types of writing and coaching around that. One thing I do is I actually work on books and ebooks. So beyond that, this is the outline that Becky mentioned. We're going to be talking about web copywriting kind of in lots of different ways including from the search engine optimization point of view that's SEO. Okay, aren't familiar with that acronym. Okay, let's start out by looking at or asking ourselves why is web copy content important in the first place? Why is it so important? And the first thing I wanted to let you know and just underscore is that your web content is the number one reason that people come to your website. They may search and they may hear about it. They may like the design. But if you have the content that is most interesting to them, they're going to come. They're going to revisit. They'll tell other people about it. It's really what we like to say in the Internet world is content is king. So I'm not a designer, but I think that content not only is important for us as writers, but also to make sure that our content is complementary to our design, the web design. So web design and web content should be integrated. They should really work together. What I wanted to mention here is the three reasons that your content is important. And it explains three big things. So when people come to your website, they want to know kind of instantly in the first few seconds what your organization is about, who the website is for, and why they should care. Those are kind of the big three questions on people's minds when they first arrive. We'll be coming back to this over and over again. So they're looking at why your issue is so crucial and compelling that they should care about it and they should get the information they need from your website. Now of all of the possible organizations out there that are doing the work that you're doing, why should they be interested in your content, your organization? Your website can also help you become the go-to organization for your issue. And you want that. You want your content, your website to be that most important piece on the web that people will go to to find out about your issue. And it's a key element of your outreach and marketing, right? So we want to make sure that your content is as good as it possibly can be. So I'm going to take you through three planning keys. And before I do that, I want to make sure that we're all on the same page, that planning is crucial. A website is not something that you just kind of write and you put it up on the web and you just hope that things go well. You're going to need to do a lot of planning on the back end before you actually put anything up on the web. So let's talk about the three most important elements of that planning. The first one is to focus on your brand. And I'm just going to guess that most people on this call today know what branding is, what a brand is, or what branding is. But I just want to underscore three elements that I like to look at when I think of brand. And that is the first one, what your organization, or your company, or your program, your project, what it stands for, what you're all about. What you want to be known for. If someone hears about your organization, what do you want them to think of or feel? And what would you say your organization's identity is or personality if it were a person? What would it be like? What would a user experience to be part of your organization? All of that goes into your brand. We'll talk a little bit more about that one of the big elements of your brand is what I call your uniqueness. What really makes your organization stand out like this red apple in the picture here? It needs to be so powerful that it gets you noticed and it gets people talking about you. It gets that buzz going. So these are, I've listed here just a few possibilities of what might make your organization stand out. Perhaps you're working with clients or customers or members that no one else is serving, maybe in a location that is underserved. That may be one way that your organization stands out. Perhaps you have found an innovative way to address a problem that's been around for a long time. If so, that can be your unique selling point. Perhaps you work in a network with other organizations in your town, your city, your state, maybe across the country or around the world. If so, you're probably playing a special role in that network or that collaboration. So if you're feeling a gap, that can be your uniqueness. Another idea might be that perhaps you have people on your staff who have outstanding credentials or they've been in the field for quite a long time, they have a lot of experience. That can be what sets your organization apart. So I'm going to ask you just to take a few moments now to type in your answer to this question about the uniqueness. When someone hears about your organization, what is one unique fact or feeling? So it could be information or it could be an emotion, a feeling that they get. What unique fact or feeling do you want them to associate with you? Type in a word or two. I see folks chiming in in the chat, friendliness, healing, and relief. We get teens excited about science, belonging, our calling. We're here to help, happiness, empowerment, connection, helping people help kids, compassion, healing, hope, joy, savings, all kinds of great things coming in. We love all the warm fuzzies. Okay, so people really glommed onto that feeling part. Now think about what is one unique fact. One thing that really sets your organization apart from other organizations, perhaps in your very same city or state. Think about what one unique fact might be or information that you provide. Put that in your window. Amanda chimed in. Only place in Kansas City for students with learning disabilities. History of Iditarod Trail. Cutting edge. Lots of people chiming in in the chat. We know you can't see everything that everyone else is saying. We wish we could open it up, but our tool doesn't allow that. Cindy comments, we speak solely for the child in the court system. Anna comments, networking opportunity for journalists. Jane says, free services to all. Ellen says, largest reform synagogue in the San Francisco Bay Area. Great programming in Jewish life, quality fine arts and outcomes. We explain the pesticide treadmill. A lot of great work going on in these organizations that really helps people are capturing in just a few words here some of the unique work that they provide or the area that they fill. It's great to see all of these comments. Yeah, that's great. Okay, now you all are already on board with figuring out some of your branding terms. Now that's excellent, and I want you to keep those in mind because you're going to want to use those in your copywriting as much as you can. So let's move on. The first planning key that we talked about is focusing on your brand and you already started identifying some of those branding terms. The second planning key that I want to talk about today is identifying your specific users and their distinct needs. So you want to think about each group that's coming to your website what you know about them and what they are looking for. Now I've listed here some very common groups of people who come to websites, people who may be new to your issue or new to your organization, people who are experienced in again the topic or your organization, and make sure that you're thinking about both of those groups and not making assumptions that people who come to your website are new or experienced. You could have people from both camps. We've got donors or potential donors. We've got clients and members. If you're a membership organization or if you have other types of people who are involved in your organization, clients, volunteers, board members, etc., then we have the media in your town, city, state. It could be even international media coming. Then we have your colleagues and other organizations who work in your same topic area. Or perhaps we have some researchers from academia or elsewhere who are coming. So they are all distinct groups and they all have distinct needs. And I encourage you as you're planning your website to think about who they are, first identify who they are, and then think about what they are specifically looking for. Now in general we know that people are looking for two large things. The first one is information. The second one is an emotional connection. So we've already talked about both facts or information and the emotional content that we'd like to project or we'd like people to associate with our organization. So those are two keys that I want you to keep in mind as you think about the specific needs of your individual users. These are some general things that we know about web readers or web users. We know they have short attention spans. We're talking two to three seconds. When they first come to your website, that's how long you have to capture their interest. They're going to be thinking about those things we talked about earlier. What are you about? Who is this website for? And why should I care? Those are going to be on top of mind. We know web readers read slower than on paper. It used to be 25% slower. I think it's a little less these days because people are kind of getting used to reading on screen. But we know that it's still slower than paper. We know that web readers need to know that the content is relevant to them before they read beyond the first two to three seconds. You've got to keep that in mind. We also know that they're scanning. They're not really reading. The most important pieces that they're scanning include the first two paragraphs, headlines or the subheads, the bold characters. And sometimes if you're lucky they'll get to the end and just kind of scroll down to the end and see what's there. We also know that web readers are going to share your content if they like it. So it's all about sharing these days. So we want to make sure that we're conducive to that. We're offering them content that is easily shareable. Now I talked, this is kind of a big thing when it comes to thinking about your readers and planning for your readers is thinking about putting them in the spotlight. So we're not talking about promoting your organization per se. I'm encouraging you to see things from their point of view. So you're going to show how you can help them part of the solution, the solution that your organization offers. You're going to encourage them to trust you. What's it going to take to do that? You want to keep them connected to you because it's essentially a conversation you're having with them on the screen. People read the web usually one person at a time. I mean once in a while you get a group hunched over a laptop looking together but it's usually just one person. So they want to connect with you. They want to have a conversation with the writer of that page. They want to be steered to relevant resources and information that makes sense to them and they want to be inspired. They want to know that your organization is offering something inspirational and your organization is inviting them to be part of your success. They want to see your success and then you're an invitation to be part of it. A big question on the web and I alluded to it just now was this whole thing about trust. You all know that there are so many scams and so much misinformation on the web. We want to make sure that your organization doesn't get caught up in that. We want to make sure that your reader understands that you are trustworthy and not only can they trust you with the information that you're providing but they can actually trust you with whatever donation or volunteer time they're going to be offering you. So these are some quick ways that people have found to encourage their readers to trust them. First one is to show endorsement. Who's already on board with your organization? There may be some celebrities or local politicians or other well-known folks who show their support already that you can talk about on your website. Perhaps you've had some mentions in the press. That's always adds to credibility. There are several organizations out there that give excellence ratings to nonprofits. And if that's the case for your organization you definitely want to talk about that on your website prominently. And you want to be transparent about everything. So your website is not going to be hiding any information. It's going to make it easily accessible to your viewers. In sum, the kind of data that you need to gather when you're in this planning stage, when you're starting to plan for your specific readers is to think about just a few things here that I've listed. Their values, their problems, and their goals. What problems do they have that they're looking for solutions for? What would they like to see happen in their community, their goals? And don't forget about what they already know or believe because you can build upon those areas of knowledge. They may also have some misconceptions about your community or about your issue. And if that's the case, you need to know that because you want to dispel those myths right on your website. This is a very short list of the types of data you need to gather as you're in this planning stage. Now I'd like to move on to the third planning key. So we covered the first one which is focusing on your brand. The second one is identifying your specific audiences or readers and their needs. And then we move on to planning key number three which is emphasize benefits more than features. And I'm just going to talk a little bit about the difference between these two. It's pretty much a business term, the difference between features and benefits. And I'll just go over that quickly. So a feature of your work is a component or a characteristic of what you offer. It's usually your product or your service. In nonprofits we usually say our programs or our services or our projects. Those are our features. Now I encourage you to move past your features into your benefits. And that's really where we learn about how the features improve the lives of your clients and your community. How do those programs or services satisfy their needs and desires? Now sometimes these benefits can be a little bit hard to get to. So I offer some questions that can help us get specifically to the benefits. So these three questions here, what does your work mean for the clients or community? Another great way to get another great question to get to that benefit is for each feature or program or service you offer, ask so what? Who cares? Kind of a blunt question. And sometimes we forget to ask it because we kind of assume that everybody knows. But it's important to ask that question and answer that question. So what? Who cares? How does what you're offering result in something better for the clients or community? Another way to say it, in the business world we've often heard what's in it for me. Everyone's heard that. But in the nonprofit sector we add just a little bit and I like to add two words here. What's in it for me and us? We're not just talking about a single individual. We're talking about the community. So what's in it for me and us? All three of these ways to get to that benefit, all three of these are ways to get to your benefits. And I'll refer again to the so what question because I like the briefness of that question. So what? Okay. So let's look at an example here. It's just a simple example of a homeless shelter. So this homeless shelter has lots of features, right? It offers homeless families, a soup kitchen, warm beds, restrooms, childcare, etc. What are the benefits of those features? What is the impact? I've listed a few of the possible benefits, higher level of nutrition and stability, a higher level of employment, fewer families living in cars, less desperation, often leading to other social problems, the sense of being a community that cares for everyone. Those are some basic benefits that come from their features. Now why am I going over this? Again, because this is the third planning key that's crucial to your copywriting. You want to get past your features into your benefits. Here's another example from an organization called Slow Food USA. And this comes from their mission statement which is a great place to start when you're thinking about features and benefits. So it says, Slow Food USA reconnects Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils, and waters that produce our food. We seek to inspire a transformation in food policy, production, practices, and markets. Okay, so that kind of tells me what they do, but I can ask the question, so what? Who cares? Why should I care? They answer, so that together we can ensure equity, sustainability, and pleasure in the food we eat. Okay, now I'm starting to see some benefits that come from the work they do. I'm going to give you an opportunity to think about that so what question when it comes to your organization. So if this is an opportunity to type in, what is your so what? What is the ultimate outcome, result, or benefit that your community gets from your program? Minutes to type that in. These are good questions and thought provoking. We have a number of people from TechSoup who are on participating too, and it's really fun to see how they're chiming in about TechSoup's so what, and uniqueness, and all of those things. So we have some people saying, we give all kids a chance to realize, oops, it scrolled up on me, all kids to realize their full potential. Martha comments, building a stronger sense of Jewish identity and purpose. Nikki comments, stronger family units. Jessica comments, connecting people with resources and information to become self-sufficient. Dominica says, access to healthcare for those who cannot afford such services. Are these getting to the point of what you're so what questions, where your actual benefits are that you're hoping people pull out during this Dahlia? There's a lot of other ones in here. Yeah, I think it's a good first start what people are saying. I guess my challenge to you would be to think about, whatever you've written, whatever you've typed in, if you can answer another so what question, that you're probably going to get to a little deeper level of so what. Keep digging on the so what. That's a good advice. Let's see, one example, could you read off one example, Becky? Sure. Let's see, Rebecca comments, fill jobs in area with educated students to increase profitability and success of local economy. I think there's probably, I mean there's tons of others. Jacqueline says, girls stay in school and learn. Okay, let's just look at that one. Girls stay in school and learn. Okay, great, so what? Why should I care about that? The answer to the next level of so what or that second so what is going to be closer to your benefit? Educate this organization, educate girls. Okay, that's what they do. That's their feature. And they learn, okay, that's good. But why is that important? Why should I care? So what? Again, sometimes these so what answers are hard. They can be hard because we are so used to knowing the answer kind of intuitively. We work with this stuff every day, right? We know the answer kind of without even thinking about it. But someone who's new to your organization or to your topic even might not know the so what. So I encourage you to be as explicit and clear about it as you can. Okay, just a reminder here whenever you're talking about your programs also talk about your benefits. What? Let's move into the next section I wanted to talk about which is how to increase your usability and your accessibility. We've done our planning. We thought about our brand, our specific folks and their needs. And we've thought about the benefits that come from our work not just the features. We've done our planning. Now we're going to move into the implementation phase for our copywriting. This goes back to something I said earlier which is the imperative to put the user in the spotlight. So here we're going to move from the we to the you. And I have an example here. We want to bring native plants back to our community but we need your help. Okay, that we is obviously the organization, right? And we want to see if we can turn the tables just 180 degrees so we're starting to see things from the you perspective, the reader's perspective. You can help improve our city's environment, plant and save native plants. They bring many benefits to our community and help avoid eco trouble down the line. That paragraph even has the word benefits in it which is something that I underscore. So here we have an example of moving from the we to the you. And I encourage you to always be thinking about that even when you're describing your organization and what it does. Think about how it's benefiting the you, the reader, the user. Let's look at this example of some copywriting that came from guidedogs.com. And I'll give you a moment to read through this after you finish reading it. Type in how it makes you feel. One word. What a terrific visualization that is. Denise comments comfort, warm, thankful, safe, empowered, great, hopeful, emboldened, inspired, peaceful. Lots of really good sentiments coming in. Optimistic, content, secure, joyful, beautiful and wanting a dog. Interested, familiar, friendship and a companion animal. So a lot of good sentiments being chatted into us right now. Have you found any not so good ones? Sometimes when I ask people this question to read this they say something that's not so great. One person just chimed in a little over the top or cheesy. I got a little misty actually but I'm in a cheesy kind of state of mind today. I love my pet. That's the only one that was slightly on the negative side so far. That's actually pretty common. I usually get mostly warm and fuzzy feelings. And once in a while some people say yeah it's a little bit over the top or a little bit cliche or whatnot. My point here, I have two points actually. The first one is to think about how this story talks about the organization but it's from a user's point of view. It asks you, my user, to imagine yourself in the story, to really relate yourself or feel yourself being part of this organization's work with companion animals. It's asking you to do that not solely from a factual or head oriented way but from your heart. It's making that emotional connection with you. It goes back to something I said earlier that it's not just about the facts but also the emotions. You've got to have both of those in there. The other point I wanted to make about this is this organization knew who their readers were. They knew what they're thinking about and what they're looking for from their website. They reflected it back in the story. It's going to be different for different audiences and you may get a lot of people who are not really turned on by this. But as you've seen from this group here today, most people like it. Most people feel attracted to it. They made the bet that most of the people who come to their website are going to be like the majority of us who actually like this story. And Diane actually just mentioned in the chat just asking how did they know? How did they know that it was successful? Is it based on traffic? Or did they get comments from people? Did they know that it actually isn't turning people off? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know how they specifically found this out. But my guess is that they did some audience research perhaps in a focus group or in some other surveys or some other kind of research that they did to tell them that this was the type of copy that would resonate with their readers. That is one thing that is pretty convenient about the web is that it is all kind of numbers on the back end. And you can often track what's effective and what's not which I think segues nicely into your next slide. Thank you Becky. All right. So this is one type of research that has been done over and over again. And that is reader research or website viewer research. And they did it on a heat map. So in this study they found that they were tracking people's eyes. Where do they look on the web page? Where are they looking first and most? And they found that the upper left hand corner is where people look the most. The red and yellow here on this slide. So that means to you as the copywriter that you need to put your most critical information right there. They also found that the left column of the page is where people look the most and that's probably because we read left to right in English. So you want to make sure that your left column is offering the information that you want to make sure people see. In addition, the first two words of a sentence or a paragraph are the most seen. This goes to the scanning behavior that we know web readers use. They look at the first few words or sentences, determine what's going on, and whether I want to read the whole paragraph or I'll just skip around, that kind of scanning behavior. So we want to make sure that we're writing for that kind of reading. For those in the journalism community, and I used to be a journalist so I'm kind of familiar with this, the whole idea of leads and the lead you have to start or lead your piece with the most important information. Again, because people are scanning. So think about 56 to 60 words as the first part of your page that you want to make sure people are reading. In journalism we call it the inverted pyramid where you put the conclusion first and then all the details a little bit later that people can read or not. You want to summarize the main points through what, when, where, and why. And that goes to your big benefit. You're so what? What problem are you going to be solving? You want to say what the page is about and why people should read it again in the first two to four lines. They know they've got those short attention spans just a few seconds and they're going to decide do I want to read this page or not. So you want to make sure that you're providing them with that information. People can get really frustrated if you don't have what they're looking for or even answer one of their questions in the first few seconds they can just easily go to the next website. Another important thing to do when you are copywriting for the web is to chunk your information as much as you possibly can. Use easy to understand categories and one way to do that is just use lots of subheads. Sometimes again when people are scanning they're looking at those headlines and the subheads and they want to kind of get a sense of what your story is just by reading the subheads. So that's a good little exercise you can try. See if you can tell your story or give the most important information just in the subheads. You've got a list of three or more items. You definitely need to number it or bullet it. Again, make it easy to scan. See if you have a juicy pull quote or something else that you can feature make sure that you're offering it to them in a very well-designed way that pops out that will lead them to read the rest of the story or at least to get a sense of what you're talking about. I talked a little bit about headlines and their importance. Use a few words to tell the essence of the story as I said. Now, SEO, Search Engine Optimization is an important thing and we're talking about that starting right here with the use of keywords. Keywords are basically the words that someone would type into a search engine to find you. So you need to identify what your keywords are and make sure that those keywords are showing up at least in your headlines. Use the present tense if at all possible. If you're not talking about something historically then see if you can use the present tense much more action-oriented for web readers. These days a lot of times people are looking at websites on their cell phones. So they may only see the headlines. If so, you want to make sure that those headlines are accurate and they are predictable about what they'll find once they click there. Your headlines need to say, stop, this message concerns you, my reader. Again, the reader is wondering, does this really matter to me? Do I need to read this? Is this website for me? You're going to make sure that you're answering those questions in the headline. Speak directly to your intended reader's concerns and we've talked about that earlier. And whatever graphic you're using, especially your main graphic on the page, needs to be tied directly to your headline. As I said earlier, your design or your graphical elements and your copy, your text elements need to be integrated. In fact, when I work on copy for websites I always want to know who the designer is. I want to be in conversation with the designer to make sure that we're on the same page. Here's a little bit more about keywords because of their importance in SEO. You want to make sure that you're using your keywords as much as you can. If it's a short page you can use them just two to three times. If it's a longer page you want to make sure that your keywords show up regularly. One great way to call them out is to put them in bold. You don't want to have a whole page of bold. That's going to defeat the purpose. So identify your keywords. Once you identify them, put them in bold, make them easy for people to read. Another great way is to make them into links that will link people to more information about those keywords elsewhere on your site. One thing that sometimes people do when they're just starting out and they hear about keywords, they use them everywhere. Kind of awkwardly, that's not a good idea. That's kind of a worse practice in copywriting. So you want to use them naturally and strategically. A great place to start using keywords is near the top of your page. We know, again, people are going to scan and they're often going to kind of, the first place they look is the top of your page. So they're looking for those keywords. If you can feature them prominently right there on the top, that's great. Now when you're thinking of your keywords, again this goes back to something I said earlier. Some people who come to your website are going to be new, and some of them are going to be experts or experienced. So once you know who they are, think about some keywords that are going to be useful to different people at different levels. Google offers lots of help finding keywords. Another great website to think about when you're doing keyword research is wordtracker.com. Now what is the ideal sound online? What do you want to sound like? I talked a little bit about having a conversation on the screen, and that's exactly what the sound should be like. Should be conversational. Use the second person as much as you can. That would be you or your, kind of going back to what I talked about earlier, of moving from the we to the you. You can include sentence fragments. It's okay to do it sparingly or with a conjunction, or you can begin with a conjunction such as and, but, or so. In a conversational way, again you don't want to make it too, you don't want to go overboard with that. The sound is really like a savvy best friend. Someone who knows what they're talking about, but they're not so overbearing and intimidating that they scare you off the site. So you're looking for that balance. Another balance here is you want to be easy to understand, but you don't want to be simplistic. So if you have a choice between something clever and kind of witty and something clear, I would go for the clear. Clear is always going to help your reader understand you quickly and it's also going to be better for search engine optimization. A writer's voice is important to develop as a copywriter, especially if you're also a blogger. The reason for that is your readers are likely to share your experiences or at least relate to your experiences. So that personal point of view is really important. If you can let it shine through in your blog or in some other place on your website, please do that. People are not looking for a robot. They're looking for a person to connect to. I just have a few things I want to say about links. And we're going to be getting to the reviews of sites in just a few minutes. So links should be used strategically. One great thing about the web is you can use links to send people to important information that's kind of background or technical information that you don't really want to grab them with. You can always send them to other pages where they can find out more. Your idea here is that you want to emphasize the important information in a concise way when people first come to your pages, to your upper level pages. You want to repeat in strategic spots, repeat your links in strategic spots that help people follow along, find things on your website that mean something to them. So they're going to have a train of thought. And I encourage you as you're planning your website to think about what that train of thought is going to be and then offer them links to help them through that. We'll see some examples of that when we look at website reviews. This is also something that is common for links. I just wanted to make sure that you're aware of it. It's important that you use a brief description like just a few words of what your reader is going to find in links and not use something vague like click here or more information. That doesn't really tell people what they're going to find once they click on it. So it doesn't really encourage them to click. It's also not very good for SEO. So an informative link would look something more like this. Learn more about the latest report on climate change. And notice the link is where the underlining is, latest report on climate change. That tells me exactly what I'm going to be looking for when I click there. Another one might be a list of foods high in calcium. That phrase would be a link. It also stands out. So a link is helpful to people, to search engines. And when it stands out either in bold or just as a link, it can help people scan through your page. Something important that I wanted to mention also is that your website should issue calls to action. And I know most people have a donate button or something like that on their page which is a start for a call to action. If there are any other ways that people can interact with you right there on the website and they can actually do something, that's what you want to think about encouraging them to do. So for example, if you've got a comment section, encourage them to actually use the comment section and share their experiences. If you have a newsletter, encourage them to sign up for it and tell them what the newsletter is going to be that they're signing up for, etc. Just a few other SEO tips. Something called a page description is something that you're going to want to make sure you're using. It's about 160 characters. It's basically what we call a snippet that is displayed when you search for something on a search engine. You find the link but then you find a little bit of text that describes it. So you can actually control what that text is going to be in your page description. Higher search engine rankings are important to think about and these things that I've listed here will help you get to those higher rankings. Your content needs to be useful for people so they actually stay on your site once they arrive there. You've captured them in those first few seconds. It's fulfilling to them. They're actually getting what they expected when they went to your website. It's so valuable to them that they share it or they bookmark it. You're going to engage your readers again with something that they're actually going to do on your site. If they do something that increases the search engine ranking, and if your site is linked to related sites that can also help you. Now most people on the call said that they regularly update their sites which is great. One reason I was happy to hear that is because it's great for SEO. In addition to updating your text, think about links that you want to earn from other sites. So that would be approaching other sites that are related to yours and asking them to do a mutual link with you. That can help you with your SEO as well. Just a few tips about editing. Cultivate conciseness. And I've made this in little acronym with an extra S here. KISS K-I-S-S-S. Keep it short, simple, and scannable. So this is a great little mnemonic device, KISS with an extra S. Tell people how to act right away and why they should do that. And so what? Keep your sentences to 10 to 14 words if you possibly can. Shorter is better on the web. Think about tweet worthy phrases, sound bites, things that people can really glom onto and make sure that it's something that is memorable and shareable. Think about one to three screens as the length of an average web page. You don't want to have people having to scroll down to really scroll down past one or two pages to find out the information that they're looking for. So you want to keep those pages short. And search engines like to have at least 250, 300 words on the page. If it has less, they're probably not going to see you. So think about that. In addition, though, think about the fact that you have to balance it with brevity. So studies have found that users spend about four seconds for every extra 100 words. And we know these people are impatient. They have short attention spans. So you want to limit the length of your page, but not have it too short that the search engines are not going to see it. Roof-free, of course. And I actually recommend reading it out loud to hear what people are going to read. Most people hear words when they read them. So you want to sound really good. I've mentioned before the importance of integrating your text or your copy with the graphic or the design elements of your page. I just wanted to reiterate that here. And the idea that the photos that you use, because I encourage you to use photos as much as possible, they should be action shots, and they should see people benefiting from your mission or at least accomplishing your mission. Whatever photos you have, see if you can use some micro copy captions to summarize them and possibly contain those all-important keywords right there in your photos or the alt text that goes with the photos that your designer will probably know about. Okay, now we're just about to go into some website review, but before that I wanted to tell you about the concept of a swipe file. You may already know about this, but basically it's a file of websites or other documents really that you like and that you want to see if you can adapt those ideas to your own work. So you're not really swiping it literally, but you're borrowing the ideas and you're crafting them or adapting them to your specific needs. So I encourage you to bookmark websites that you like and jot down somewhere about some notes about why you like them, what are the elements that really jumped out at you. Use your swipe file to feed your internal idea factory, give you some inspiration when you might be running a little dry. And you can also collect poor content and use it as a reminder of, well, I don't really want to do this. I want to make sure that I'm not doing this. I wanted to let you know that we have some resources that are downloadable after this webinar and a starter swipe file is part of those resources. You'll get that in a moment. So I'm going to ask you to look at this page from change.org from their website and type in maybe just a few words of what jumped out at you, what you might like or not like about this page. We have some people chiming in, cute kid. That definitely stands out right away. Another person commented, boxy. Somebody else commented, it's too busy. One person said copy below each image is very descriptive. Like the top, too busy at the bottom. Kind of busy, not sure where to focus. Needs name of kid. Good summaries of past petitions and results. So lots of different comments coming in. One person says their eyes bounce all over the place. One person asked, is it a carousel? It's hard to tell on a static page whether it's a carousel at the top or just a static image. One person commented too much white but that it's a great picture. So lots of different feedback. Yeah, lots of different perspectives on this one which is good. Again it goes back to that idea that everyone is going to have a different perspective and it's always a good idea to test your pages or at least your concepts before you put them up online. So I'm just going to say a few things that I saw on this page that stood out for me. The first one was that they had a tagline and I really liked that, the world's platform for change. That gave me a sense when I first got to the page of what they do. Okay, so they're involved in change and the world's platform, I wonder what that is. I'm kind of curious. I'd like to know more. What do they mean by platform? They also said the number of people involved, 65 million people taking action, victories every day. That sounds interesting to me. I like that number. I want to know more about it. So you have the tagline and then you have right under it kind of a secondary tagline there. That gives me a sense again of what is this website all about? I also like the little success story that they had with the kid. Notice they only gave me a little blurb there, but it's enough of a success story to lead me to want to know more and they have a more button there. So that may be enough for me to kind of be curious and want to know more about what's going on with this kid. The other thing I liked about this site was that it had right at the top there start a petition button in red. I might have suggested that they put it on the left hand side because we know that as I said earlier, the upper left hand corner is where most people start, where their eye is kind of linger. So that's the one change that I would make to this one. Look at this one, nature.org. My comment on this one is that I like that they have this nice infographic. It's very clear, easy to understand and it has clear numbers. Numbers are something that we love in this culture. So numbers can help me understand quickly what they're talking about and quickly to understand their impact because that's what they want to convey to me. Here's another website, kiva.org. Empower people around the world with a $25 loan, it says. I don't really know what Kiva does, but it has something to do with empowering people around the world with loans. So I want to know more about that. It also says a loan of $600 will help this person to restock, close for the retail business. I'm not really sure what that's about, but I know that I can contribute to the $600 with my $25 loan. That's interesting. I'd like to know more about that. What I liked about this was that they had a lend now button. So it's not donate now, it's lend now. I'm curious. I don't know what that means. I'd like to know more. This website, dosomething.org, I don't know if you can read the text on here. It's a little bit small on their About Us page, but I wanted to point out that it really shows that these people know who their audience is. Their audience is young people. We can see that on their tagline. Any cause, anytime, anywhere, join 2.5 million young people. So they're about young people. The text says, dosomething.org makes the world suck less. Now if I were on a website for seniors, I probably would not see that sentence. But this is a website for young people. They're trying to emulate the same kind of language and phraseology that their target audience will use. So I really liked that, and I just wanted to bring that up. Okay, so let's look at some submissions that came in. And do we have any questions, Becky? Maybe we can answer in a minute or two? Sure. We have actually quite a few here. One question that came up was, some of the things you talked about about users and how they're reading and viewing online, we had a couple of questions asking, are the scanning tendencies different between mobile and desktop users? And also, are people becoming used to sort of the infinite scroll that a lot of new band angled websites are coming up with? Or do we know that those still aren't the mainstream trend? What are the feelings on that? I think it's mixed. I think a lot of websites have that infinite scroll, a lot of them do, the newer ones, but the older ones, or the ones that are kind of more established, they still tend to be the one to three screens. So it's really going to depend on your audience and the impression, the brand that you would like to encourage people to see your organization as. It also goes to your audience as well, because are your folks more traditional or maybe on the older side of demographics? Or are they the new hipsters that are thinking about, yeah, infinite scroll is kind of cool. And I like to do it on my cell phone, so I'm cool with it. Again, it's really going to depend on your users and whatever research you've done on who is using the website. Great. Yeah, and I think that's a big part of knowing and understanding your audience and really what's special and unique about them. So that's great advice. We do have other questions, but if you want we can go ahead and move forward with reviewing some of the site submissions that participants shared, and then hopefully we'll have some time in a few minutes to get to some more of the questions. So stick with us. Yeah, and the other thing we wanted to say about questions, I think Becky, didn't you say that there's going to be discussion forum after this webinar? Yeah, well we welcome people to continue posting and having this conversation in our community forums on TechSoup. And also Dahlia has volunteered to write up a blog post for us, a guest post that will recap some of this and maybe highlight some of the questions that we may not have time to get through, but hopefully we'll have a few minutes to do a couple more questions toward the end. Right. Okay. I was just encouraging people to type in their questions. And if we don't get to them today we will get to them in the discussion forum. Okay, so let's go out with this site. This site was submitted from not far from the tree and I'm just going to go through and give some highlights of things that I saw that I liked and things that could be improved in the future. So this site to me felt very easy to understand. We pick fruit and share it. That's pretty clear. I know what they're about and I can make a donation if I want to, but I want to find out a little bit more about them. So right here about not far from the tree I see that it's giving me very precise information. And I'm noticing that the sentences tend to be a little short, which is great. And the blurb is really, it looks like it's less than 100 words, maybe even less than 15. Good. If you can describe what your organization does in that few words, I want to hear about it. I feel like, yeah, it's clear enough for me. I know what to do as a reader right on the header. If I want to donate, if I want to volunteer, or if I want to have my tree picked, my fruit tree, I understand. I can do it. I can even request donated fruit. So it's giving me information about what I can do right now. But if I want to find out more about not far from the tree, I can. I can just go to the about page here, what we do, who we are, where we pick, et cetera. I can find out more information. So I can also act right here right now with the, even, yeah, I like the call to action with a make a donation, but also under get involved, there are other ways that I can, that are calls to action. It also has specific audiences in mind, I noticed. It has the volunteer community, and then it has people, homeowners, who have trees that need to be picked, and then it has in mind people who need to request fruit donations. So it's very clear about who the audiences are, and it makes it very easy for me, whoever I am, in whichever group it is, for me to get involved. I like their volunteer page. So it tells me about the volunteers and how it all works. I like the subheads here, pick fruit, pick fruit, and be supreme, volunteer in other ways. I noticed one thing on this page that I would have suggested, under pick fruit here, we have fruit picking portal. So it says, if you'd like to pick fruit with us, click here to sign up and create an account in our fruit picking portal. Not sure about the click here, I would probably suggest that the word fruit picking portal would become their link. Just to get away from the click here. That's a great suggestion. And one thing that I wanted to highlight, we had one person on the back end asking, Jacqueline was asking, how do you write content if you serve both young people and old people, or if you have varying audiences? And I think this site actually, what you showed on that first page is a great example of having some audience segmented channels essentially that people can come because it's often likely that if you're serving young people and old people, you are not old people, but different age groups or different spectrums of the population or of your community, you may be serving them in different ways. So volunteering or donating or homeowners, I think this is a great way to do that without needing a super high-tech website that has customizable channels that can open up. And it's great if you can have that, but if you can't, I think that this is a great example of how to really speak to those different audiences that you may be serving. Yep, exactly. And notice this Donate Volunteer Have Your Tree Picked line shows up in every page, so it's very easy to kind of get there. I don't have to go back to the homepage to find it. Okay, let's move on to this other website by Woods Humane Society. I liked, I'll just scroll down a little bit to show you the homepage. A little bit, well, it's not that long. It's two or three screens long, which is fine for the length of the homepage. I found it to be clear and concise. Notice the blurbs are concise, on and on and on. And they also have some really good information right there at the top, Opening Homes and Hearts to Homeless Pets in San Luis Obispo County since 1955. Wow, okay, that tells me what they do, where they are, and how long they've been doing it. Own one sentence right down at the top. Very nice and clear. I would hope that it looks like this is an image right here, the Opening Homes line. I would hope that it would also be searchable by search engines because it includes some keywords, homeless pets, San Luis Obispo County, etc. Then we have volunteers become a shelter's best friend. Okay, I like very clear what this is about. It helps me if I'm an individual, what I can do, if I'm a community service, if I'm a student or a volunteer group, etc. I also like the fact that there are so many links on this page. Check this out, all these words in yellow or orange are all links to other places on the page. Give me more information or email addresses of people who I wanted to go to their Pets at Home link. This page also has some really nice links. They do this throughout the site where they give me links in color and bold that can help me navigate very quickly. Look at this site. Every child fed. Malnutrition causes more child deaths than any other illness. Find out how you can make a difference. You can make a difference is a link. I like that, but I think it's a little bit too generic. Most organizations can say you can make a difference. It doesn't really tell me so much. When I click on it, I can find out a little bit more about what I can do, which is nice. Let's click on it. Here on this page, I like the Did You Know series. They have this on a lot of pages here on the right hand side. Did You Know? The Did You Knows tend to be their so what. They give you a little bit of information. Some facts, I'd like to see a little bit more of a so what behind their facts, but it's a good start in that so what area. I didn't know just from the home page, I didn't know that this organization focused on Africa, but it does. So it took me a while to figure that out because I went under where we work and they had three African countries there. It would have been nice to find that out much more easily right there on the home page for them to tell me. The other thing I wanted to say about this site under the Our Work section, that's where they talk about the uniqueness of their work. There are some unique aspects to their work. I won't go into it here, but those uniqueness pieces should have appeared on the home page because those are part of their brand and they should be keywords that are going to be showing up throughout the site. So that's just what I wanted to say about that site. Let's go to many. This site didn't give me a sense of what it was about. My first question as a user, what is this about? Who is it for? And why should I care? I didn't get any of those questions answered. So I really wish I had much more information about really anything about this page. Let's go to Senior Assistance Center. The home page, I liked that they gave me some information. Did you know which is kind of moving into their, so what, which is nice. I like that they told me their mission, and I also know that it's in Colorado right there on the first page. They gave me a little bit of credibility information here. They told me that they are accredited by the BBB. I used to know. I looked here on the right hand column, Services We Provided. It's in such small type that I couldn't read it. And I know that my senior mom could not read it either. And the users of this site are going to be primarily seniors or their children. So again, we have to think about who is coming to the site and what are they going to be looking for. Something else I wanted to point out about this site under Programs, if you go under Program Overview, it starts out with programs offered, and it gives a really nice overview in that first introductory paragraph. I would love to see that on the home page. Give me again an overview of what they do, a good summary of their programs, their services, and I would want to see it in a bulleted list with links that will get me to all of these different aspects on their site. The other thing I wanted to point out about this site under News and Events, if you go to Success Stories, it's a great idea to have Success Stories. Unfortunately, there's no picture here. I don't know if I want to read this whole paragraph to know what the Success Story is about. So I love the idea of having Success Stories. I think it's important to have, but I would want to see it featured in a much clearer way. It's talking about Lenora, 75 years old. Great! I want to see a picture of her, and I want to see her. I want to know what she's about. I also want to know other Success Stories that come from the Senior Assistant Center. Dalia, we are just a couple of minutes from wrapping up, so I know we had some more to get through, but I want to have time for a couple of questions if we can. So if you want to pop us back out to the slides, and I know you had a couple of other things to share too, while we pop back out, we had a question about Read More Links. Is it okay to have a Read More Link? Is that just an extension of the copy? Or do you really suggest that all links are sort of more meaningful links that are linked? I think Read More Links are fine if they're followed by a nice blurb. A nice, concise blurb that contains at least one key word of what you're talking about that search engines can see. And that first blurb has to be compelling enough for people to want to read more. So I think in that instance, Read More is okay. Great. Okay, well, we also had some questions. Betsy asked, are keywords better than meta tags? That's a good question. Meta tags are fine to use. They tend to be a little bit, they were used on the web much more in the past. They are much more important before, but keywords kind of have lasted over time over the years. Certain types of meta tags work, like meta title tags, et cetera. I'm not going to go into all the details of that, but just make sure that you've got your keywords used well and often, whether you're using other meta tags or not. Great. And we actually have somebody commenting about the Read More links. Christine comments in chat that they're not always accessible to people with vision disabilities. So for accessibility purposes, you want to make sure that what you're linking is accessible to different e-readers or any kind of assistive devices. So I think that's good advice to think about that particularly if you're serving a community that has a higher need. But we know that lots of people in all segments of the population have needs for accessible links and sites. So keep that in mind. We are almost at time. We've had a bunch of people chime in the chat already that they're interested in this special discount of having your website reviewed that will be offered to seven different people on this webinar. Thank you, Dahlia, for making that offer to our participants today. So I'll be taking those names. If you're interested, go ahead and chime in that she's offering this for the discounted rate of $17 that she'll review your site and give you feedback like what we just did in a mini version with some of the reviews we showed here live. We'd also like to go ahead and thank you so much, Dahlia, for this and remind people that they can visit writing to make a difference. And we also have a link that will share. It's in the slide deck that you'll receive after I didn't have a chance to add it to this one this morning. But it's a link to a discount for her book if you'd like to actually dive into this more. And for those of you who are interested in keeping in touch with Dahlia, if you'd like to receive her newsletter go ahead and select to opt in. We won't share your information otherwise, but if you do want to subscribe to her list go ahead and click on that yes, and that gives me permission to give her your information to sign you up so you can get her regular newsletter updates. Dahlia, how frequently do those come out? Dahlia, once every month or two. Okay, so you're not going to be spammed by it, so that's great. Before you leave us today go ahead and chat in one thing that you learned during this webinar that you're going to take back to your own website to improve your website copy. And let us know so that we can hopefully take that along in feedback and improve on what we're doing. And we also would love it if you'd share this with your colleagues and friends and help them improve their own website copy and be communicating more effectively with their own audiences and supporters. While you do that I'd like to just quickly share our upcoming webinars and events. I mentioned in the chat window that for those of you who are interested in learning more about SEO or search engine optimization, our very own TechSoup's very own James Metzger who is our SEO Pro. Staff will be talking about how to think like a search engine next week and he'll be diving into that in much more detail in a 60-minute free webinar next Thursday. You feel free to join us for that. If you're participating from a library or you work with teens and tech, feel free to join us on May 20 for a webinar on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics programs in libraries. Then on May 21 we'll be talking about how to excel at everything and that will be a 90-minute webinar on how to make your spreadsheets better and lots of Excel tips and tricks. It should be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to learning how to up my Excel moxie too. And then on May 28 you can learn more about getting tech donations particularly before the end of TechSoup's fiscal year on June 30 where many of our donation programs reset. You can access donations before the end of the fiscal year and then get more on July 1. So join us for those and more on our website and you can see all of our events on our events and community section. Connect with us at TechSoupGlobal.org on TechSoup.org and on our Facebook and Twitter channels. Thank you all so much for joining today. We really appreciate it. Thank you Dahlia for taking the time to share your expertise and all of these great tips and giving feedback on a bunch of websites today. We really appreciate that. Lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing the use of this platform to present these weekly webinars. You can visit and learn more about their program through TechSoup at TechSoup.org slash ReadyTalk. When you walk out of today's presentation or closeout, please take a moment to complete the post-event survey that pops up to help us continue to improve our webinar programming. Five is excellent, one is poor. So go ahead and give us your honest feedback so we can continue to make these better. You'll get that email from me later today including this PowerPoint and the full recording. Thank you so much everyone. Have a terrific day. Bye-bye. Thanks everyone. Bye for now. Bye-bye.