Interview: Catherine Toole, Sticky Content

Catherine Toole is a copywriter, journalist, and lecturer who founded and is managing director of Sticky Content, a digital-copy agency specializing in planning, writing, and editing copy across digital platforms, from websites to email, and mobile to blogs. She explains how web users scan for key “information cues” rather than reading screenfuls of text, and how writing copy that is search-engine friendly is now simply part of the job.

The main difference between writing copy for print and the web is how your readers read you. Online, to be frank, they don’t. Instead of reading from left to right, top to bottom, studying and digesting text as they might with print, online readers scan pages fast, looking for information cues and signposts. Web users are impatient, task-focused, and extremely disloyal: if they can’t find what they’re looking for easily, they’re off.

A decade ago, we’d be commissioned to fill commercial and corporate websites with lots of news stories, feature articles, and white papers. Quantity was the focus – lots of “deep content” was supposed to result in longer site visits, and average length of visit was a key statistic used to sell online advertising space. But now, we focus on short, highly influential text that encourages actions and transactions: key messages; signposting; top-level navigation buttons; and link or “anchor” text. It’s not about how long a user stays on your site anymore, it’s what your text can get them to learn or do while they’re there.

With most commercial sites, readers are not there for fun. They want the cheapest flight to New York, the best deal on car insurance, your company phone number. The title of the famous usability manual by Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think, is a great mantra for web copywriters. If your text is well structured, easy to scan, clean, clear, and beautifully written, readers should be able to find their way around and interact with the site easily. And that usually translates into sales.

Less is more online. Text must be kept focused on home pages, landing pages, and other top-level pages. The function of these pages is to help readers orient themselves and to encourage them not to leave the site but to move forward to a specific action or information point.

Before Google, most web users typed in a URL and landed on your website’s home page. Now, because the majority of traffic comes from search engines or email, readers tend to land directly onto a product- or topic-specific page lower down in your site structure.

There’s quite an art to writing these “landing pages.” They must be short, scannable, findable by search engines, yet still compelling, benefit-led, and targeted. Usability guru Jacob Nielsen’s “Rule of Twos” asserts that online readers focus on the first two words of a sentence, the first two sentences in a paragraph, and the first two paragraphs on a web page. So good writers look to front-load sentences with the most important messages or the biggest customer benefits.

Copy on web pages, especially landing pages, has to be self-contained. It has to make complete sense in itself, out of context of the rest of the site, as there is no way of knowing where readers have arrived from and how much they already know. The best sites use a consistent, on-brand tone of voice and deploy strong editorial style guides and formats across the site. Frequently, when we start a project, there will be guidelines for designers but no language guidelines for copywriters. Often our first job is to agree and write these.

We’re often asked to suggest links for web copy too. A web copywriter must be aware of what else is on the site, so they can insert links that direct readers to other, relevant content. Of course this process can be automated – the related links in the right-hand column of the BBC’s news website is a perfect example of this – but this only works if web editors and publishers tag their work correctly in the first place.

Tagging is another task unique to the digital copywriter. We are often asked to tag individual content items with key-word phrases, categorizing each piece so that it can be easily linked to in future by authors writing on the same subject. If a strict tagging convention isn’t observed, this doesn’t work. For example, if one writer tags a bride’s story as “wedding” and another tags a piece “marriage,” the two won’t be related unless you have software capable of making the connection. Even now, not all our clients have software or conventions in place to do it well, and we end up being asked to suggest links manually.

“Web users are impatient, task-focused, and extremely disloyal: if they can’t find what they’re looking for easily, they’re off.”

Calls to action are vital. Since visitors create their own journey through a site, you have to give them lots of options on every page. And you can’t control their point of entry, so you must persuade them again on every page. Search engines have a huge effect on how we write copy. Pre-Google, we didn’t think much about search terms. Now, so many online businesses live or die by organic search results that search-friendly copy is a must. In basic terms, this means using the same words and phrases people enter in search boxes for title tags of pages, anchor text of links, headlines, and body copy. These search terms will often be supplied to us by the site’s SEO (search engine optimization) partner. Rather than call a page “Our software solutions,” you’d title it: “Our accounting software packages”: it’s specific and potentially matches what a customer might put into Google.

Search-friendly copy often relies on nouns and key words, but it’s not about squeezing in as many search terms as possible at the expense of flow or style. The best web writers do it without sacrificing tone and readability. Asking and answering questions is one good technique for holding visitors’ interest and inserting key terms seamlessly. Print journalists struggle with writing for search as their copy must become more functional and descriptive. There’s no room for clever puns, so “Simon Cowell deported from US” is a much more searchable headline than “Mr Nasty voted off.”

Not that writing search-friendly copy is just about headlines. Most SEO experts would say link (“anchor”) text is actually more important, as search engines partly evaluate the “relevancy” of the website to a certain word or phrase based on the number of links to other relevant content.

Part of a copywriter’s job is to work in linking text, internal and external, in such a way that the connection is clear. But links for links’ sake will annoy – you need to ensure they are helpful and relevant. Best practice is to ensure it’s clear from link text what readers will get if they click on it.

So search-friendly copy is often more practical and obvious than copy in other media. The editor of a retail website for an international brand used to brief us with: “If it’s a toss-up between meaningfulness and creativity, go for meaningful.” But informative, search-friendly headlines are usually longer than creative lines, and there is often not enough space. Which is where we get into fights with designers …

Too often copy is an afterthought and we are brought into a project when the design and build is pretty much there. So we have to “write to fit” spaces left by designers. It’s what we call the “<copy goes here>” syndrome: it causes serious problems. If a button is easier to understand if it’s five words long but a designer has only left a ten-character space, it’s the user who suffers.

The best projects are the ones where the designers and copywriters work together from the start. Designers often prefer to design with “real copy” rather than placeholder text anyway. And if the copywriter gets involved early on, they can influence the information architecture of the site, ensuring that text is presented in a logical structure. Also we can work together to create strong page formats that work editorially as well as visually: clear, repeatable formats are what make websites easy to use and navigate.

Equally, the best web copywriters are very aware of what the designer is trying to achieve with the look and feel of the site and are keen to support it. Sadly, since most web content is published via content-management systems, it’s all too easy to send off your text and never review it in situ prior to publication. Ideally, a writer should be aware of what the finished page will look like and make sure copy both makes sense on the page and supports the design.

Without personality, you’re not interesting

Having reduced your copy down to a potent core, you have one final job to do: check for personality. All too often copywriters craft clear, concise copy that presents the message accurately and delivers all of the requirements of the brief, yet is bland. This is the result of technique winning out over creativity, and must be avoided.

With so few words at your disposal and the restriction of having to create pieces of tight, informative copy that can be read in any order, adding personality to your copy can be a major challenge. Use the lightest of touches. A choice word in the opening paragraph, the use of a surprising word on a hot button, the inclusion of a colloquialism in a headline, or the addition of a throwaway comment at the bottom of a page – as long as it is in line with the agreed tone of voice, brand style, and objectives of the brief – can work wonders. This light touch can be all you need to include a sense of humor and show that there is a human behind all of the technology and glitz of the site. This is about breaking, or seeming to break, with some tone-of-voice conventions and adding a few surprises here and there, adding a little bit of spice to the mix.

“In an internet world, opportunity for marketers has nothing to do with recreating mass marketing and creating commercials that can’t be skipped. Instead marketers can use the many dimensions of our media culture to tell more complex stories faster and more effectively than they ever could have using television commercials.”

Seth Godin

All Marketers Are Liars

One way of weaving a strong personality into your copy is to recognize that you are enjoying an interactive relationship with the visitors to the site and to acknowledge this is the way you should present your copy. It is generally expected that the tone of voice for a website will be more conversational and flexible than within more formal material such as the annual report or company brochure, so play to this. Be chatty and relaxed, suggest links rather than telling visitors where to go, welcome them when they get to the new page, and invite them to visit a different page if the one they’ve landed on doesn’t suit them.

Personality requires some nerve and a lot of energy. It requires you to push yourself outside your usual risk-free comfort zone and try a new approach. This is the only way to be different. It is no use trying to write your site “in the style of Innocent Drinks” for example, when you should be writing your site in the style of your client. It’s one thing to add a few friendly comments, and quite another to maintain a consistently warm and friendly tone of voice throughout the entire site, even the boring sections, without the joins showing. Be confident, and enjoy putting across a strong personality, but remember that everything you do must be on-brief and relevant to the overall tone of voice and brand style of the client.

Your project may be a single email rather than a website, and may contain moving imagery and soundbites. Writing for the spoken word is similar to writing for a reader (or scanner!) but you should incorporate an additional technique: read your copy aloud as you develop it, to check for timing and credibility, rhythm and flow. Messages that read well do not always work well when spoken, so the more you listen to it, the more you can fine-tune it into credible copy.

Your visitors may be creating their own content

Content is increasingly in the hands of the visitor. Not only do your visitors choose the messages that they are prepared to absorb, they are able to create their own messages too and compete with you for the attention of the other visitors. They may be writing customer reviews, conversing in your chatroom, contributing to blogs, or posting content onto YouTube, MySpace, or similar site.

Larger corporations are finding themselves competing with “amateur” sites that aim to tell the “true” story about the way they conduct their environmental responsibilities, or about what their trading ethics are like, or perhaps to expose some form of unappealing practice. As a copywriter who fully understands the target audience, if you are looking after the content of the official site you have to be aware that your target audience may well be looking at these less complimentary sites too, and address this. Openness and honesty is an integral part of the directness of modern digital communications – it cuts through the clutter like nothing else.

Your tone of voice should be real and credible, not just an acceptable corporate stance. Reflect the tone of the blogs your audience write and read by being conversational and less formal than the client might expect (you can justify this as a characteristic of the internet) and build maximum credibility by providing strong, accurate, and informative content that cannot be accessed elsewhere. This will help to give your site a clear point of difference from other commercial competitors.

“The internet has rapidly become the tool of choice for spreading information about multinationals around the world.”

Naomi Klein, No Logo

Your audience expect the best of both worlds from you. As a minimum they want the site to have a quality look and feel, with excellent navigation, and to be packed with features and points of interest. They also expect you to provide very detailed, in-depth, and original content that will enhance their knowledge and inform them fully.

As copywriter, your role is to help move the client’s voice forward to match the typical sites that are visited by your target audience. By doing this you will fit in with the visitor’s perceptions about cutting-edge websites. As well as gaining their attention, you might just achieve the ultimate objective and create a site that they recommend to their closest friends and colleagues. You never know, they might even post some of it on YouTube!