erm yes, very. Webcopy is really important, the people that write the webcopy for our websites know how to:
- Write web pages that keep their reader glued to the site
- Create marketing emails and direct mail letters that generate warm leads
- Blog and write articles that raise their profile so people remember them
- Manage their social media and online presence to enhance their reputation
- Get their press releases published
Here is a convo I overheard at an Internet show. Its concerning a website owner and them doing their own text for their website and providing their ‘own’ images for their website.
Webmaster: Would I be correct in saying the text is copied directly from [your competitors] website? I would advise against using any copied text as it would put your business / website in a potentially bad situation (legally and from an ‘optimisation’ position as the search engines either wont index the page at all or will not rank you highly)
Copying other websites’ images will put you instantly liable for prosecution from the various companies out there that enforce the copyright of images, know someone that had to pay £1800 after using an image like this.
Website Owner: Can we use a picture from the competitors site but just take the wording out? Regarding the text I will juggle the wording about would this then be acceptable
Webmaster: You cant copy anyone’s images or text without potentially putting yourself under threat of legal action.
You can juggle wording about but unless its re-written from scratch it will probably still match in the tools we have to match text. The legal side of websites / publishing is not our specialty but I know enough to avoid the threat of legal action. It took me 20 seconds to find out that you have copied the text and images and you should know that this is a hot topic in the Internet world at the moment.
Images should be bought from stock agencies or taken by yourself and text needs to be created from scratch by yourself or completed by professional webcopy professionals.
