This is the era of digital marketing and placing purposeful and effective content on your website is of utmost importance. Creating content and generating value through it is an art. A purposeful content is the key to online business success.
What Is Website Content?
Website content refers to anything that you place on your website. Be it text, audio, video, image, info graphics or any sort of data that communicates and present information to the visitor. It is a way of communicating directly with your target audience.
Why is content important?
Not all content is effective and able to make visitors stay and interact. If your content is powerful enough, it helps you derive conversions by convincing visitors to take action.
According to a study the average time a visitor spends on any website is just around 8.5 seconds. That means you have got a very little time in which you should be able to grasp the visitor’s attention and give them something to make them hooked to your page.
So your content must be well written so that it excites your audience and make them engage to the site generating leads. Following are some ways that you should consider when developing your website content.
Things that you should consider while developing your website content:
-
Identify your Content’s Purpose:
First step in writing content is recognizing the need why are you writing it? What purpose do you want to serve through it? Even different pages of a single site will have different objectives so write accordingly.
Identify what you are generating through your writing. Comprehending the core purpose is the first step. It will help you keep focused and create purposeful content. Keep the following pointers in your mind when you start creating content:
- What is the objective of your writing?
- What do you want to achieve through it?
Sale? More traffic?
- Do you want to generate profit through conversions?
- Do you want to give a product review?
- Or are you trying to increase the traffic to your website?
- Or do you want to gather customer review through it?
- Or the purpose is just to spread awareness and share information about something.
Understanding this will help you to stay concise and avoid unnecessary details that will make the whole thing wordy and boring. And it will help you choose relevant words and tools that call to action (CTA).
-
Understand and Define your Target Audience:
The second most basic step is to have a clear understanding of your target audience and their demographics. If you fail to fully understand your target audience here, the vibe and the information of your content will not resonate with their interests and they are very likely to leave the page and switch to other choices.
So consider their needs, preferences, interests, solutions they are looking for. These things are also essential while picking design and template of the site. You will be unable to attract and retain visitors on the site if the content is not matching to the intended audience’s demographics.
You can read our article on How to Get Clients for Website Development and get further useful information related to this topic.
Gather the following information about your audience before you start writing for them.
- Gender
- Age
- Social class
- Income
- Region
- Race/ ethnicity
- Level of education
- Level of employment
- Choices, preferences
Understanding this will help you generate content that will be relevant and appealing to the visitors and make them stay longer on the site.
-
Research and Gather relevant data:
That leads you to the next step which is doing research and generating creative ideas. Seek and gather information by taking into account all the stakeholders. This could be done by surveys, questioning, focus group, analysis or just by observation. Now brainstorm engaging ideas and gather relevant information to create good and authentic content. If you add facts and figures to the content make sure they are authentic and from reliable sources.
-
Organize your Content:
The structure and layout of your content plays an important part in grasping reader’s attention while marketing your content on the web. Don’t write one whole, lengthy piece of writing instead categorize it into headings and sub-headings to enhance readability.
Switch to paragraphs. The world is fast paced and people are mostly hasty. They may not have the time to read a long written document and might skim through it. Add something that captures their attention and make them stay.
Add visual and captions. Label the pictures. Use friendly tone. Be concise and relevant. Provide interesting facts and figures. Keep the content simple and easy to digest and understand. Because not everyone uses the same language as you and they might have just basic understanding of it.
To get maximum attention of visitors:
- Use wording and facts that are easy to recall helping consumers to come back.
- Make use of bullets, numberings and short sentences.
- Never, ever plagiarize. You can take ideas from others work but generate your own content.
- Refrain from using excess adjectives and adverbs.
- Support your work with examples and statistical proofs.
- Your first line needs to be very impressive to hook the readers to the page otherwise they will switch and look somewhere else.
-
Add Visuals:
Visuals are more powerful than the text-heavy subject. They increase the attention span of readers by presenting the information in a fun and digestible way. Visually appealing content is pleasing to the eyes, boosts engagement and leave a lasting impact on customers. Insert visuals to break up the long text.
They could be in the form of animations, tables, memes, graphs, charts, shorts videos, photos,GIFs, illustrations, info graphics, etc, to graphically demonstrate the key message. An easy way to add visuals to your text is using data visualization tools. They are web based applications and software that help to create graphs, charts, maps, tables out of the text and other visual display of data.
-
Make Mobile Friendly Content:
Most of the websites that are visited by the users are viewed using smart phones. Use of PC, tablets and laptops is much less than that of smart phones. If you fail to design your site content in a way that accurately displays and functions on mobile phones, it will become inaccessible to users making it useless and corresponding to having no website at all.
Make sure that a smaller and functional version of your site content opens accurately on smart phones. Your links, photos and other data is responsive to various mobile devices. The layout and design of the site are simplistic and easily navigate able through small screens. It will help in expanding audience reach, providing better user experience and increased chance of leads and conversions.
It also enhances your SEO ranking as it is one of the base factors on which the website ranking depends according to Google.
-
Learn What Competitors Are Doing:
Keeping an eye on competitors work help you to differentiate, improve and fill the gaps. See what are they creating in terms of content and what is their general marketing strategy. Identify their weak points, gaps they are leaving and start working on them to get an edge over their work.
Try producing unique and new content as to differentiate your work from them and stand out in the eye of the consumers. Learn from their failure, capitalize from their success, avoid what they did wrong and come up with innovative content ideas to set you apart from them.
-
Promote your Content with SEO:
The content generated by a site is useless if it is not visible to searchers when they look for it on the internet. The content must be reachable through search engines like Google. For this you must infuse relevant keywords, headings and subheadings in your text at appropriate density.
They help you reach better access at search engines and help bring your site at the top of Google searches. Add internal linking to your site that redirects users to other web pages of your site. The goal here is to make the visitors stay longer on your site which will help enhance ranking on the search engines thus boosting audience reach.
-
Use keywords that Call-to-action:
ALong with this, use keywords that prompt instant action such as, ‘hurry now’, ‘subscribe to this’, ‘the deal is closing’, ‘join’, ‘buy now’, ‘don’t miss the chance’ and others that are compelling and convince the visitors to perform the desired action.
Wrapping Up
By properly incorporating above mentioned content marketing strategies to your site will help you generate a content that is effective, have greater audience reach and increase conversions by improving engagement with ease.