Last year, I wrote over 100 top-ranking articles for global brands. Connecting with the reader – especially across a longer content series – is an art and a science. You have to be:
- A good writer who’s taken the time to empathise, understand what’s driving readers to this search, and deliver the information in a way that meets them where they’re at
- A good editor who’s taken the time to kill their darlings, polish their text, and remove the errors that distract the reader from the message they’re trying to convey.
In this post, I’m going to focus on the second.
Whether you’re editing an academic textbook or a news post for your website, editing adds value.
It brings clarity and structure, keeping your website visitors reading right to the end of your post. It makes sure you’re selling yourself and focusing on the story you want to tell. Plus, it’s a safety net, so you don’t lose readers who’re searching for quality and have an editing eye of their own.
By asking these questions before you hit publish, you can stop yourself from falling at the very last hurdle.
Website editing for everyone: 11 tips for success
Let’s start with some tips to improve your future readers’ experience. Take a step back and go through the following steps to look at your text like a top-notch online editor.
1. Did you use a variety of sentence lengths?
If you want to be sure you’re taking your reader along for the ride, start with your sentence length and shake things up. You might be writing fiction, non-fiction, or SEO content for your latest SaaS product, but if your sentences are a steady 20 words, you’re losing me before the second heading.
Short sentences are sharp and salty. They grab attention, but too many of them can feel like you’re talking down to your reader.
Long sentences lend richness to your text. They can add detail and authority, but too many of them can make your article seem unfocused.
Variety is the key. It keeps your reader engaged, builds anticipation, and makes people feel they’re learning from a human who gets it.
2. Did you structure your paragraphs correctly?
In my experience, there’s a sweet spot to be had with your paragraphs, too – especially when you’re going to meet your reader on their screen.
Two or three sentences, totalling three or four lines, look great on a computer or phone without feeling like a dreaded wall of text.
And of course, it doesn’t hurt to throw some images or other media in between your paragraphs too.
3. Did you use (and check) your headings?
All good articles should be broken up with headings. They’re tags to signpost the information the reader needs, they build the thread of your argument, and they do you a massive favour by helping search engines find and display your content.
When I check headings, I make sure they’re hierarchical, with H3s under H2s and H1 reserved for the main title of the post. If there’s information that seems to break the order of the headings, I consider using a quote format or a text box (depending on the theme) to convey this information instead.
One of the most important things in my final editing process is to proofread the headings. Here, I check:
- The consistency of the tense and viewpoint across all the headings in the document. This is particularly true if you’re using an FAQ approach to hit more target keywords. I want to see questions phrased consistently with ‘I’ or ‘you’ rather than jumping between the two.
- The case, choosing either title case (Where Every Word is Capitalised) or sentence case (Where only the first word is capitalised in each heading) and applying it throughout.
- The number of headings. If there are lots of headings, particularly H2s, and lots of them are phrased as questions, I consider nesting them under an FAQ heading. In my experience, no one wants to sift through a listicle they didn’t sign up for.
4. Do your links make sense?
It’s common knowledge that mixing internal and external links into your posts can do wonders for your rankings. But we also know that a big blue line of text in the middle of a paragraph can trip the reader up.
The trick here is to tick two boxes. First, attach your links to relevant keywords, with as close a match as possible between the title of the page you’re linking to and the phrase you choose. Second, avoid the feeling that you’re shoehorning in links for clicks. If you need to include more internal links, try separating them from the rest of the text instead.
Like what you’re reading so far? You’ll find more information on the editing services I offer in the Text Services pages of this site.
5. Did you connect with the reader without writing like you speak?
This is the most objective tip on this list, but also one of the most important.
There’s a fine line between creating a distinctive brand voice and annoying your reader. No matter what type of content I’m editing, my first step is often to remove the well-meaning “Wells” and “Sos” left over after a first draft. You can meet the reader where they’re at without transcribing your exact pattern of speech.
If you really want to make someone feel like they’re speaking to someone they can relate to, focus on clarity, layout and design, and well-placed idioms instead.
Copyediting tips you can’t afford to skip
Last year, I wrote more than 250,000 words for my clients. That’s about the same wordcount as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but it only represented about 50% of my working hours.
The other half of my income comes from copyediting. Like many publishing terms, this might sound mysterious, but it’s really the invisible art of close reading, strengthening the author’s line of argument and ensuring consistency across a text before it’s typeset or published online.
Read more: Developmental editing vs. copyediting vs. proofreading.
I’ll be the first to admit that the web editing process is usually less exhaustive than with print. The stakes are lower if you can go back to your page and change it later. Even so, I’d never press publish before I made these final checks…
6. Are your parentheses consistent?
Are you a brackets person or a dashes person? If you went for a dash, did you choose the right one?
There’s no wrong answer here.* Generally, my US clients prefer an unspaced em dash (which looks—if you’ll pardon the intrusion—like this). My UK clients are more likely to use a spaced en dash (a little bit shorter – two hyphens long instead of three – but still just as effective).
From your content editor’s point of view, the most important thing is that you pick a style and stick to it. If you write your choice down in a style guide and apply it to all the content you publish, they might even give you a hug.
*unless you use hyphens as parentheses, which is a great way to break a copyeditor’s heart.
7. Have you used hyphens correctly?
One of the biggest signs of an inexperienced writer – and one of the easiest for an armchair proofreader to spot – is hyphenation. This is especially true when it comes to your adjectives.
Let’s review:
- Adjectives before a noun get a hyphen in the majority of cases (‘The blue-green lake glistened.’ ‘Our time-saving app will change the way you work.’)
- Adjectives where the first part ends with -ly don’t need a hyphen (‘a highly specific rule you’ll soon get to grips with.’)
- Adjectives after the noun don’t need a hyphen.
8. Did you use a consistent style of English?
This is usually a question of the UK or US, though matters are complicated by the Cambridge English variation that prefers -ize spellings alongside colour and honour spelt with u.
The biggest categories to watch here are:
- -ise vs -ize at the ends of words. With very few exceptions (compromise, for example), US English will always use -ize.
- -our vs -or in nouns like colour/color
- -re vs -er, especially in the word centre/center
- Double vs single letters, especially in words like travelled/traveled or focussed/focused
- Double vs single quotes. UK English generally prefers single quote marks with what we call ‘nested doubles’ for quotes within quotes. In the US, double quotes with nested singles are the norm.
- Punctuation inside vs outside quotation marks. In the UK, commas and full stops can come outside quotes that don’t amount to a full sentence. In US English, it’s much more common to have them inside the quotes, regardless of the length of the phrase.
- Full stops after abbreviations. In the UK, if the last letter of the abbreviation is the same as the last letter of the original word, you don’t need a full stop (Dr Corday trained in England). Stateside, the full stop is indispensable (whereas Dr. Greene interned in Chicago).
Most of these can be checked during self-editing with a simple search in your word processor. I’ve also found that programs like Grammarly, which toggles between the two styles, can help you pick up more potential mistakes than built-in language-specific spell checks in Word or Google Docs.
9. Do your numbering rules make sense?
Writing for the web, it’s common to write numbers one to ten (inclusive) in full, while the best way to write a figure higher than 11 is to use numerals.
This being said, you can make an exception for the headings in a numbered list (which I’ll always set in numerals), numbers at the beginnings of sentences (which I’ll always write in full), and blog posts where there’s such a mix of figures that it starts to look cluttered (in which case, I’ll usually decide to write everything as numerals to keep things clean).
It also pays to double-check how you’ve written larger numbers in your post. For ease of reading, I usually add a comma to numbers with four digits or more, for example, changing £1000 to £1,000.
And as one more numerical tip, it never hurts to check your listicle points are still in the right number order before you click ‘send.’ It’s far too easy to overlook this when you’re editing the shape of your article.
10. Have you paid attention to ‘that’?
Using ‘that’ with verbs like ‘argue’, ‘show’, or ‘say’ is a matter of personal preference, but readers can notice if you don’t make your choice clear.
When I write, especially for US clients, I tend to go through the piece at the end, highlight “that,” and remove the ones that aren’t critical to the meaning of the sentence. UK authors are slightly more likely to keep them, but even that isn’t a hard and fast rule outside of the style guides of traditional publishers.
11. Are your calls to action clear?
I’ve often edited articles where the writer has tried to do too much with one piece. This is never more true than in the critical calls to action.
Here, a strict editor will help you find one clear call to action, phrase it conversationally, and leave your readers with no doubt about what to do next.
If you’re going it alone, try to edit out the distractions, put yourself in the reader’s shoes, and keep the call to action consistent with the voice you’ve established in the rest of your text. If you can present it as a button or a clear, inviting link, so much the better.
Congratulations, we just edited your blog post!
As you write and publish more long-form online content, you might find ways to add to this list with points of your own. Or, you can hire a remote freelance editor to take care of it for you.
If your content project has grown arms and legs and you’re up to your elbows in Oxford commas, get in touch.
