• Jamie Jensen is an award-winning writer and business strategist based in Los Angeles, CA.
  • When entrepreneurs become fixated on existing clients, products, and services, they miss out on opportunities to optimize their website for new business, Jensen says.
  • Jensen says these four key changes helped her clients acquire new customers and increase their revenue by up to 900%. 
  • Capture your customers' attention with a clear, concise "Brand Promise," and foster an interactive buying experience with language that prompts the user to take action.
  • You'll need to learn how to speak in your customers' language, not yours. Perform market research through conversations, focus groups, or surveys to learn the words your customers are using. 
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As a copywriter who's spent the last seven years focused on what drives sales online, I truly hate seeing businesses make mistakes on their websites that hurt their bottom line.

Interestingly, it's often the businesses that care the most about their customers and clients who miss out on using their website to its fullest potential as a sales vehicle.

I believe this is because it's easy for business owners to become so focused on their existing clients, products, and services that they miss the mark on optimizing their website to drive new business. The result is a ton of missed opportunity for not only acquiring new customers, but also turning your website into a space that loyal fans want to return to again and again.

Out of the hundreds of websites I've worked on over the years, there are four key changes I've found to make the most impact for my clients — some earning up to 900% more revenue as a result.

Read more: The pitch and email template a 6-figure freelance copywriter uses to sell additional services to her clients — and get them to say yes

Let your website do less, but better

A wonderful quote from Greg McKeown, author of the book "Essentialism," touches on the power of paring things down from an operations and lifestyle perspective. He writes, "If it isn't a clear yes, then it's a clear no." 

The same is true for your website copy. Many websites are cluttered with way too much content, which is only overwhelming to the visitor. It confuses them before they know why they're there in the first place, making it a "no" before your business even has a chance to properly introduce itself.

Fifty-five percent of users will spend less than 15 seconds on your website, Tony Haile, the CEO of data analytics company Chartbeat, wrote in 2014. That's not very long to convince them that your offers are worth their time, let alone their money. But, if you can get someone to stick around for longer than 30 seconds, it's far more likely that they'll stay long enough to take valuable action, and even come back again. This is why clearly, distinctly, and quickly communicating the value that a visitor will receive is so critical to your website's success. That also means: Say less, but have it pack a punch.

Every customer who lands on your website is asking themselves one question: "What will I get out of this?" And, as your own website copywriter, it's your job to answer that question clearly and quickly. I call this the "Brand Promise," and if it's not something that your homepage or landing page contains, then you'll undoubtedly lose customers.

My recommendation: Make sure that the page of your website that gets the most traffic has a clear, concise statement of value. For example, my food therapist client Melissa Ramos' website promises you'll "Feel sexy from the inside out."

Read more: I charge clients up to $2,500 a month to ghostwrite their dating profiles and connect with potential matches. Here's my advice for perfecting your dating profile, and why I never message people on the weekends.

Make it clear instead of clever

Brand personality matters, but your potential customers understanding where to go and what to do matters more. Many creative entrepreneurs have fallen prey to the desire to "stand out" above all else. The problem there is that when you prioritize cuteness over clarity, you run the risk of confusing your website visitors. And, if they're confused, they'll click away before they take any valuable action.

A business can't expect a website visitor to work at understanding the value of their offers or how they can shop. It's the business' job to make the buying process easy. This may require a paradigm shift from the old way of thinking about marketing and advertising copy because a website is not like a brochure, a pamphlet, or a billboard. A website is an online self-guided personal shopping experience. That means that the copy you use on your website doesn't need to be fancy or impressive. It simply needs to be conversational and clear.

So if you're using creative language right now for your "Our Story," "About," or "Shop," pages, my advice is simple: don't. You will confuse your potential customer instead of giving them the clear direction they need to have an excellent, self-directed shopping experience.

Use your customer's language

Business owners are typically experts in their own industry and field. If you sell luggage or water bottles or exercise equipment or offer wedding photography or consulting services, there's industry language that might be natural for you to use.

But keep in mind that your words and your customers' words are not the same. So, if you've done the work of making your "Brand Promise" clear but you're still not seeing an increase in sales or average visit length, it could simply be that you're not speaking your customer's language.

With one client of mine, making this change was the difference between a few sales and a few hundred sales. A wedding photographer I've worked with, Alicia Meraki, was excellent at communicating her process and the high-end equipment she used, but it didn't translate to sales via her website. After working through my program and exploring the words her clients were using when describing the type of wedding and photography they wanted, she started using their words: genuine, unconventional, and fun. 

Now, how do you capture that language? You'll want to gather market research. Depending on the size of your business, this could mean private conversations, focus groups, or massive surveys. Many companies use market research to make decisions about products, positioning, and pricing, but this research is specific to mining language. When it comes to copywriting and the actual words that end up on your website, it's essential to use the exact words that your customers are using.

Read more: I made over $10,000 in September as a freelance writer. Here's how I landed gigs quickly and the system I use to stay organized.

Write for interactivity

Remember, your website is meant to actively engage your customers and move them through an interactive buying process. Visitors have to make choices on where and what to click on. And they have to take the action of clicking and sticking around. 

If it's going to effectively drive sales, I suggest thinking about the writing on your website in terms of a dialogue. This is how you can best mimic the experience a customer would have in an equivalent brick-and-mortar shopping environment. 

When the brand speaks, it speaks in language that the customer can immediately relate to and identify with. And when the customer has an opportunity to take an action, their response language should be placed into the "button copy," where they're meant to click. For example, check out this engaging "button copy" dialogue from sales strategist Erin Lindstrom. Her would-be website visitor's enthusiastic response is inserted right where they're intended to click: "Send Me The Course!"

These small details make a huge difference in terms of amplifying the interactive experience of a website to drive more engagement, visit length, and sales.

If you make the effort to create a clearly defined "Brand Promise," declutter your pages, choose boring-but-clear over clever-but-confusing terms, and speak to your customer in their own words, you'll be certain to see an immense increase in website sales.