1. Write an attention-grabbing headline.

Your homepage must grab visitors’ attention and quickly show the main benefit you offer. How does your product or service improve your customers’ lives? Does it save time? Help them make money? Give them pleasure or safety or comfort?
When you’re clear on the benefit, imagine explaining this to your teenage nephew in two sentences. No details — he has no patience for them.

For example:

ABC Software makes a company more efficient, by simplifying its sales process. Increased efficiency helps the company make more money.

Then re-work the language to speak directly to your customers in a way that fits your brand. For example:

ABC Software. Simplify your sales. Save time. Make more money.

or

A simpler sales process improves your bottom line. ABC Software gets you there.

Keep tinkering until you have a headline people understand and that you feel great about.

2. Write clear and conversational web copy.

Don’t make visitors work to understand what you offer.

First, ditch jargon. Decide what you mean and write it in ordinary English. Read aloud what you’ve written, and adjust it until you sound like a normal human. Nobody uses words like ‘synergistic’ in real conversation. Because that would be weird.

Also, make your web copy conversational. This doesn’t mean using slang, it means sounding friendly. A quick improvement you can make is to use contractions. Use we’re instead of we are; use don’t instead of do not, etc. Much friendlier!

3. Edit and be concise.

No writer gets it right first time. We writers allow ourselves to write terrible first drafts, so we have words to work with. During editing, we sculpt that raw material into something effective.

When editing, look for long, complicated sentences. I recommend using Hemingway to help spot them. Often, it’s easy to split a long sentence into two shorter ones. Sometimes you’ll need to reorganize a sentence to make it work.

Use as few words as possible. If you’ve written 100 words, challenge yourself to get it down to 75. Then try 60. Keep going until everything left is essential.