By carefully organizing the copy on your website, you can keep visitors engaged and increase the chance they will commit to your business.

Let’s use a comparative analogy of food to illustrate this point because we consume food with our eyes before our mouths. If you order your favourite meal in a restaurant and it arrives as a jumbled mess on the plate, you would be within your rights to send it back or walk out. Depending on how that experience went, you may never eat at that restaurant again.

Instead, let’s say that this food came out perfectly organized on the plate. The protein was neatly placed by a medley of compact veggies, and the sauce drizzled delicately and precisely without any drips. Now you can’t wait to eat it.

This is the same food on the same plate, cooked the same way. One is disorganized and looks inedible, and the other is organized and looks delicious.

Before people read your website copy, they scan it first to see if it’s, well, digestible, and maybe even delicious. Are there bite-sized pieces of information they can easily chew and swallow? Is there too much information or too little that will dissatisfy or cause indigestion? Can they scan the whole meal and know how to consume what they want when they want it?

Many of these questions don’t materialize as clear thoughts. They are just running in the background, forming the decision for your prospects to stick around or walk away.

Invite visitors with satisfying content

Organizing your website copy will make the biggest difference to your online business presence. It doesn’t matter if your website has many products and services or just one. Your visitors can only take in so much information at once, and don’t want to feel overwhelmed or underwhelmed.

Your website should function like a fast-food restaurant with simple menus that allow people to consume satisfying content on the fly. This is about knowing what information to present, when to present it, what to repeat, and what to leave out.

Keep in mind that most people are looking at your website on their phone, which is a little window into your home. Use balance and judgment to organize copy so that your visitors feel invited into your home, and can move freely from room to room.

For instance, does it make sense to present your prospects with a call-to-action button or a link in your copy? Or would that be a premature distraction?

Think of your website as your home for sale with an interested buyer looking through your kitchen window. What do you want them to see from this limited viewpoint? Certainly not the cutlery, saucepans, and food in your fridge and cupboards. These are not your selling features. You want them to see the new appliances, the island where they would prepare food, the spotlighting overhead, and the custom cabinets. These are all items of interest if you’re buying a house because the kitchen is a main selling feature; the same with the bathroom, the living room, and the garage.

Organize your website copy so that whoever is interested in what you’re selling, they can find it quickly and easily. Are your navigation options clear, minimal, and intuitive? Too many options and submenus are overwhelming and suggest that finding information may be difficult.

Overall, your website copy has to be concise and flow logically because the way people expect to read websites today is a seismic shift from those written just a few years ago.