Don’t Write Like a Robot: Make Your Website More Personal

It takes more to personalize a website than just writing the content yourself. While you may have gone through the motion of typing (or had another person on your team do it), the words you use are in danger of being no more than empty space or worse, robotic.

Luckily, it’s simple to make sure your website’s content is personal. You just need to follow one rule: never use someone else’s words in place of your own.

In practice, this means not using any “canned” phrases or, as an old professor of mine used to joke, “Avoiding clichés like the plague.”

To tell if you are guilty of the sin of stale language, check your website for any hackneyed phrases like these:

“We deliver prudent financial advice.”
“We provide strategic services and customized financial solutions.”
“Our unique approach of sophisticated portfolio design and oversight.”
“So that I can truly serve my clients.”

Not only are these phrases unforgivably stale and boring, they also lack any real meaning and more importantly, fail to have any impact on your reader (who in your case is often a prospect gathering their first impression of you).

Proof of their deficiency is that each phrase can be rearranged in any order and still mean the same thing. Do you deliver prudent financial advice, or was it prudent financial solutions? Does your unique approach of strategic services provide a comprehensive financial plan, or was it your comprehensive approach that created the strategic solutions? I could juggle these junk phrases all day.

Oh and the last phrase. Maybe it’s because I have seen it so many times, but whenever I see the words “truly serve” I get annoyed. What the do they mean by “truly serve?” Does everyone else “falsely serve?”

Instead of relying on overused words and phrases, think honestly about what it is you provide clients and describe those services with your own, original thoughts. Don’t be afraid to do your own thinking – you might be surprised by what you come up with.