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The most important rule of writing great web copy is that web copy must be scan-able. You can be an average writer and still write effective web copy if you follow this one rule.

What I mean by “scan-able” is a visitor should be able to glance at the page and know what it’s generally about, and also understand the salient points. This is important because people read websites differently than they read other things (like newspapers, books, or other print media). They don’t read word for word from the start; instead they “scan” the page to see if it’s something that they want to invest the effort in reading. And if something catches their eye, they’ll start reading right then and there, and not at the beginning.

Notice that I also said “invest the effort.” There’s a reason for that.

See, we don’t realize it, but reading on a computer is harder than reading a book, magazine, or newspaper. Computer eye strain is very real. In fact, I personally need glasses when working on the computer, but don’t need them for anything else (the upside here is my wife thinks I look cute in them … although I’m not sure I want to look cute). The thing is, we really don’t realize the extra effort online reading takes while we are doing it, so it’s generally unnoticeable. But the bottom line is it’s harder to read online content, so without even realizing it, we scan webpages before we start reading them.

Now, we scan other places too. After all, we choose which newspaper stories to read based on the headline, right? But my point is we do this even MORE so online, so your web copy must be scan-able over the entire page. If it isn’t, you will have a very hard time converting visitors the way you want to.

So how do you get your web copy to be scan-able? You’ll use three things in general:

 Headlines

 Subheadings

 Bullet Points (like now)

Let’s look closer at these three items.