5 reasons your web copy isn’t converting

Ahh the feeling of a new website. It’s like when you were younger and you rearranged and tidied your whole bedroom to show off to your parents. Look at what I did! Isn’t it cool and different? My life will be SOOO much better now. 

Your new shiny website has given you a spring in your step, so you’re spending time and energy on promoting it and admiring your analytics as your visitor count skyrockets. Oh yes, this is the place to be. 

But suddenly, you realise a couple of weeks or months have gone by, and not much has changed. Your site’s still getting a lot of visitors, but you’re not seeing any increase in leads or sales. They’re bouncing right on out of there like Tigger wearing moon boots on a trampoline. 

Something’s stopping your prospects from converting, but what?

I have a few ideas. 

1. We we we

‘We’re a company that…’ ‘We’re passionate about…’ ‘We love to…’

Sorry, are you an extremely agreeable Frenchman? Or a little piggy running all the way home? No? Then stop with the ‘we we we’. 

People visiting your site don’t actually care about you. They care about how you or your product can benefit them. If you don’t get to that point straight away, they’ll be out of there quicker than you can say ‘bonjour’.

Skip the self-promotion, keep ‘we’s to a minimum, and make sure your web copy is all about your audience to keep them interested for longer. 

2. Features over benefits 

On a related note, no one cares about the fancy features of your new product either. They care about what those features mean for them. So if you’re not providing that information up top, they’re probably not even going to scroll, never mind hit ‘add to cart’.

When Apple were promoting the iPod, they didn’t say ‘5GB of storage’. That’s a feature, and a snoozefest. You hear that and you ask, ‘so what?’. Instead, they said, ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’. There’s the benefit. There’s the reason you part with your hard-earned cash. 

By leading with benefits over features, you take the mental load of figuring out why the feature matters away from site visitors. Sure, you can talk about features somewhere on your site for people who really want to know, but let benefits do a lot of heavy lifting. 

3. No flow 

Conversion copywriting basically comes down to psychology. How do people think? What do they need to hear and when do they need to hear it to make them move to the next step of the customer journey? 

If you don’t get that right, you’re going to turn them off straight away. It’s like going on a first date and asking them to marry you and have lots of babies before you’ve even said hello.

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. What do they want to know straight away? Where might they want to go next after getting that answer? Where on your site would they be when they’re ready to press ‘go’ on whatever you’re selling?

If your website isn’t flowing intuitively, visitors aren’t going to waste their time and effort figuring it out. Instead, they’ll get frustrated and take their business elsewhere.

4. Talking to everyone (meaning you’re talking to no one)

Imagine you’re in a room with a hundred other people. One stands up and says, ‘can someone lend me a tenner?’. You’ll all just kind of stare around and shuffle your feet. 

But if they said, ‘hey you with the…’ and described you exactly while looking at you, and THEN asked to borrow a bit of money, you’d probably be more inclined to say yes (or at least respond in some way). 

It’s the same with your web copy. If you’re trying to speak to a million different audiences all in one go, your message is going to get lost, and they’re going to be confused about whether what you’re saying even applies to them. 

Use what you know about your audience groups (their pain points, what they want, how they behave, the language they use) to decide who you’re speaking to and where, so you can get really specific and make them more likely to act. 

5. Bodge jobs

Look, I get it. You have limited time and budget, and you wanted to get your site live. So maybe you wrote the copy yourself. Or maybe you asked ChatGPT to write your web copy for you and uploaded it all without really checking it through. 

But there’s a time and place for DIY, and your website isn’t usually one of them. What you end up with might sound lovely, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to lead to sales. 

Writing web copy that converts is a specialist skill. And if you want to turn those visitors into paying customers, sometimes you have to invest in someone who really knows what they’re doing. 

So, if you need a hand boosting your conversions, you know where we are.