How to Write Successful Content
Coming up with content for your website is an art form of its own. Unlike print materials, website visitors prefer to skim your text and quickly make decisions based on what they see. So how do you make sure the content on your website gets visitors to stick around? And if you’re starting from scratch, how do you make sure your content has a lasting impact for both visitors and search engines? Read on for four key best practices to keep in mind as you develop your website.
Choose Keywords
Before you even start writing content, think about your company.
- Who are you?
- What are you about?
- What do you provide?
- For whom do you provide?
Answer this questions first. Then, think about the words you can use to describe your company, products, and/or services. These are the main keywords that can be found within the written content on your website. Do keyword research to figure out which keywords are actually being searched by users, and then make a list of the ones you want to focus on. Making a list of keywords to incorporate into your content will give you inspiration for how your website should read and will help you rank high on search engines. Then, once you know what keywords you want to use, it’s important to strategically place them in your on-page content to create an appropriate keyword density so you’re found by people who are truly interested in your products or services.
Keep it Parallel
When it comes to designing your website, most templates allow you to showcase images with description text underneath them. Depending on which template you pick, it’s essential that your content is parallel across the page. For example, whether you choose to have two or three images side by side, make sure the description text underneath each image is the same length.
You’ll also want the style to match. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a bulleted list or a paragraph of content. The important thing is that you do the same thing below all the images in each section for consistency and readability.
Be Consistent
When you’re creating content for your web development project, start by writing out what you want to say across your pages. Then, read it back to yourself so you can experience how a visitor will read it. This way, you can catch any inconsistencies. For example, if you’re speaking in the first person on the homepage, but switch to the third person on your services page, visitors will notice. Even variations in using oxford commas can throw people off. For example, when you list more than three items in a sentence, be consistent with either using the last comma or not using the last comma.
- I like buttermilk pancakes, coding, and reptiles
- I like buttermilk pancakes, coding and reptiles
Less is More
Your business is awesome. So why wouldn’t visitors want to read every detail about it? When it comes to your website—believe it or not—visitors aren’t there to spend a ton of time reading. They want to quickly find out facts about your products or services. So when you write your content, remember that less is more, both in the written content and number of pages you have.
Think about your products. It might be easy to decide that having a separate page for each product is helpful, but it can actually have the opposite effect. No one wants to navigate through a lot of pages to get to the product they want to see. With that, do you really need a page for each product, or would an image or icon with a title and short description suffice?
If you want to learn more about content best practices, reach out to our team for help, or follow us on Twitter for content marketing updates, tips, and resources.
Check out our website redesign guide
Are you considering a website redesign? We have compiled our top 21 tips for a successful website redesign. They are easy to understand and include videos, links, lists, and examples to guide you.
