English copywriting for international audiences

Good question! While the UK is notorious for fabulously clever wordplay on the London Underground, this approach rarely works for international audiences. But that doesn’t mean you have to write formally - in fact, this could alienate your audience even further.

Conversational language, clear grammar, everyday vocabulary are the key things to get right. Once all this is in place,, you can play with language, but avoid very local idioms and metaphors. And remember: clear trumps clever every time!

The great thing about writing for non-native speakers is that it’s accessible for a wide range of audiences, including native English speakers from a range of countries, those with disabilities and people with tried brains from their fast-paced life.

Yes, and I strongly advise optimising your website copy for SEO - otherwise what’s the point? It can be really hard for your audience to find you if it's not laced with the right keywords in the right places.

For SEO website projects, I use SEO tools to carry out keyword research and propose a website structure with primary and secondary keywords. Once you're happy with the strategy, I'll write the copy according to SEO best practice (as well as your brief!).

If you work with an SEO agency that has already identified keywords, then I’m happy to take these and use them in my website copy.

I don’t provide off-page SEO services such a html, improving site speed and link building). If you're an ecommerce brand in a highly competitive niche, then I recommend collaborating with a technical SEO specialist. They’ll be able to help you with deeper competitor analysis, backlink strategy, and technical audits.

I'm certainly up for humanising AI copy. I think we can agree it needs all the help it can get! But before you invest, please be aware that humanising AI-generated copy might not save as much time or money as you expect.

AI often looks pretty good on the surface. It has good grammar and spelling and sounds fluent.

But when you dig into it, it AI copy often needs more work than you expect. Copywriting involves a lot of thinking - you need to be clear on your positioning, audience, message, brand voice, and story before you start writing. Chatbots can’t do this on their own, so simply humanising their output might not achieve the result you want.

I'm certainly happy to chat about whether this might be a good strategy for you or whether writing the copy from scratch might be a better use of your time and investment.

Understanding how LLMs source and recommend individual businesses is still a work in progress for me and I'm working out a process to help my clients' websites appear in generative search engines (as well as my own!).

My current understanding is solid SEO will take you most of the way there, but there are some subtle differences to the way copy is written and laid out. Watch this space!

Obviously we hope this doesn’t happen, and I’ve got a solid process to make this less likely.

We’ll start with a briefing session where I'll ask you all about your goals, brand, audience and unique selling points. If you have any example copy that has worked really well for your in the past - or any that hasn’t performed well - then even better.

Depending on your project scope, I'll usually share the copy page-by-page and invite you to share your feedback, which I’ll also use to guide me as I draft further copy.

Two rounds of amends are included as standard to perfect the copy together. If you need further edits after that, we can agree on a fee for additional changes - but so far, I've never had to do this.

I’ll finish with a final proofread of the copy which I’ll either do myself or get an external proofreader to do (depending on your budget).