How to hire a good copywriter for your online shop website

Published on October 04, 2008 How to hire a good copywriter for your online shop website

Writing for your website is not the same as writing for a print publication. Online you have very limited time to make an impression on your audience. Only writing that is clear, interesting and easy-to-read will get the attention of your potential customers. You also have to be mindful of search engines – you need to ensure that you have the right density of keywords otherwise your page will appear either unimportant or spam to Google. Getting the mix just right is essential.

How do you choose a good copywriter for your shopping cart website?

The first step in the process is to evaluate the websites of the people or businesses on your shortlist.  Does their website sound like it was written by Australians for the Australian market or by someone with poor language skills? If they can’t write for themselves and promote their own business, how can they promote yours? Be careful of sites that do not make sense or appear to use the same word over and over and over for effect. These are the kinds of sites that will eventually get hammered by the search engines for ‘keyword stuffing’ so stay clear of them or your site could suffer when they come crashing down.

Hiring a professional website copywriter for your shopping cart website can help your website stand out from the crowd, which can be essential in a market that is highly competitive and crowded with competitors selling similar products.  There are plenty of people and international companies claiming to be professional copywriters on the freelance job boards, but if they can really write quality copy, expect to pay top dollar.

As an experiment for this blog we have hired some freelance copywriters from job boards with a theoretical copywriting exercise for our own website. We will report back in another post when the results are in.

Lessons: What to look for the following when you hire a web copywriter

• Do their writing samples seem interesting an inviting? Would you buy from them?
• Is the writing actually useful to the target audience or does it appear to have been written for search engines rather than people?
• How much do they charge? Is it per-word, per-dollar, or per-article?

Ozcart Ecommerce offers website copywriting service for current customers or non-customers alike.