Creating amazing website content is the backbone of your online brand and marketing efforts. We’re not just talking about blog posts– think about your landing pages and your service pages as well.
Because of the growing preference for videos and the shrinking human attention span, which has dropped to 8 seconds, or a 25% decline in just a few years, it is even more critical to create amazing website content that can catch the readers’ attention and keep them long enough to convey your message.
Whether you’re a local business, a company in the service sector, an e-commerce store, or a B2B startup, having great website content is the key to strengthening your brand and positioning yourself as the industry leader (or at least your website as a reputable online source). Hence, follow these basic steps to create engaging text-based content.
Identify your audience
Your audience is one of the most critical factors that determine the tone of your content. Depending on your target market (and nature of business), you may need to infuse your writing with warmth and friendliness, seriousness and professionalism, or even combine these “personalities.”
Your audience also determines the keywords and phrases you need to use for your website. After all, they are the ones who do search queries on Google. For example, if you’re a local roofing contractor in Northern California, the potential clients looking for your service will likely use the following terms: roofing contractor Northern California, roofing company in California, roofing in California, etc.
Aside from the search queries your target customers are using, your content should also include their problems, questions, and pain points. Again, using the same roofing company as an example, your clients are most likely concerned about roof maintenance, installation cost, different roofing materials and designs, etc.
Follow the inverted pyramid model
When writing website content, stick to the inverted pyramid model, meaning the most important information is at the top of the page, while the succeeding details provide more specific information that supports the “lede paragraph” (or opening paragraph).
When you look at the lede paragraph of this article, you’ll notice that it introduces the most important message: The reason why it is critical to create amazing website content.
Meanwhile, the second paragraph “supports” the lede paragraph, explaining that whatever the nature of your business is, creating engaging content is a must.
Then, the succeeding paragraphs explain the specific steps on how to create excellent content for your website.
Use relatable and simple language
Writing is about making a connection to the readers, not impressing them with your extensive vocabulary. For this reason, great copywriters avoid hifalutin words and jargon that blurry the message and “alienate” readers.
Even if your business is in the high-tech sector, make sure you use relatable and simple language to attract non-expert customers. Remember, you need to write for your audience and not for your colleagues.
Be descriptive
Great copywriters use descriptive words and mainly use nouns and verbs to tell an interesting story/content, while avoiding excessive use of adverbs and adjectives. To help you better understand this principle, examine the two examples below.
The beautiful and pristine nature park offers magnificent views. It’s also fantastic for hikers.
The nature park offers a breathtaking view of the mountain range. It also has a 5-mile flat trail that is excellent for beginner and intermediate hikers.
As you can see, the second sentence is more descriptive and helpful to readers with its use of specific details.
Stick to an active voice
In the vast majority of cases, you need to construct your sentence using an active voice, which means that its subject is the one actively doing the action of the verb. For example, “you can book your consultation on our website” is more direct and understandable than saying, “consultations can be booked on our website.”
Meanwhile, only use the passive voice when you want to focus attention on the person/thing affected by the action. But in most cases, you should highlight the action, so you should mainly rely on active voice sentences.
Make your content easy to digest
Nothing overwhelms people more than thick paragraphs bloated with multiple ideas. To prevent confusing readers, make sure that each paragraph only has one idea; that’s why great writers often limit their paragraph to three sentences.
Another way to make your content easy to digest is to use descriptive subheaders, numerical lists, and bullets. Additionally, the right amount of white space, which is the empty space that surrounds the images, paragraphs, and other elements on the web page, can make the text more readable and “friendlier” to the eyes.
Avoid grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors
Sloppy content bloated with grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors will reflect poorly on your brand. Plus, it will prevent you from conveying the right message to your target customers. Remember, the easiest thing for your readers to do is stop reading your website.
Use graphs and other visual representations
When you use easy-to-read charts and graphs to explain a “heavy” topic, you’re helping readers digest the information quicker and easier. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a pro graphic artist to create professional-looking multimedia, thanks to apps like Canva and Piktochart.
Aside from graphs and charts, images can also make a web page appear less text-heavy and thus easier to read. Again, the right amount and placement of white space can make your content legible and readable.
Use direct CTA
Call-to-action such as download here, share, want to read more, join, and sign up direct readers to other areas of your website or take steps that you want them to do. Just make sure that the links are functioning properly (dead links can spell disaster to your content and marketing campaign).
Ensure easy and efficient navigation
Excellent content is not just entertaining, engaging, educational, and/or informative, but it should also promote easy and efficient navigation. For this reason, you need to hyperlink certain words/phrases to relevant sources/web pages.
Internal links can help with your SEO, provided that they are genuinely relevant and helpful; this means that you should not randomly hyperlink words lest you put off readers from navigating through your website.
Final Words
In the past, many companies simply bloated their content with keywords and key phrases and were solely focused on inbound and outbound links and other technical stuff to rank high on the search engine results page. However, today’s bots are “smarter,” which means that anything that doesn’t add value to the user/reader experience is no longer considered a ranking factor.
When making website content, your top priority should be the readers and not Google bots. After all, traffic comes from people and they are the ones who read your content–not robots.
To learn more about creating amazing content for your website, contact LOJO Marketing at 916 303-4080 to schedule a free consultation with us.
