Writing your website content is very different to writing a brochure or a story for a local newspaper. You have a matter of seconds to grab someone’s attention and an even harder job trying to keep them reading on. People want information quickly and if your content looks long winded and text heavy, they are much less likely to stick around. So, with that in mind, let’s get to it. Here are our top tips for writing great content pages for your website.
Our Top Tips for Writing Great Website Content
1. Attention Grabbing Content
It needs to be instantly obvious to anyone visiting your website what a page is all about. Strong titles, images, bullet points and short paragraphs will make it easy for people to scan your pages to make sure that they have landed in the right place.
2. Impactful Text
Don’t waffle on unnecessarily, get to the point and keep sentences nice and short. Adding in extra words to try and make the content longer will only make your page appear difficult to read. Make your text in your face obvious, give people the information they want quickly and easily. If it is too hard to search out the important details, people will simply go elsewhere.
3. Give your Words a Break
Seeing a long block of text on a page brings back memories of school textbooks and hard reading. Splitting your website content into small, manageable sections will help to keep it interesting and avoid overwhelm for the reader. Using headings, bullet points or numbered lists is a good way of doing this. Images and video are another way to break up text.
4. Smoke and Mirrors
If your content is answering a question, then answer it. There is nothing worse than getting to a page that promises to give you the information you need, only to hide it away. The use of forms and other data collection methods may seem like a great conversion tool. But, you might find you lose many more potential customers along the way.
5. Link them Up
Including hyperlinks within your web content is a great way to help your visitors move around your website to other relevant pages. You should also include external links to useful resources on other websites (use a link that opens up a new tab for this). Your task is to provide your visitors with what they need to make their time on your website useful and hopefully enjoyable too.
6. Write for Them
It’s easy to get caught up in writing what you want to say, rather than what people want to know. No one really cares about you and your business, all they are interested in is what you can do for them. Talking about your accolades and awards can help instill trust, but don’t lose sight of the fact that waffling on about how amazing you are will turn people off.
7. Different Strokes for Different Folks
With your audience in mind, you might want to think about the type of content that resonates most with them. Not everyone learns in the same way and therefore not everyone needs the same thing from your website. Long form detailed content is good for some, but others want the main points in a flow chart and that’s all. Do your research and test out different types of content in differing formats to see what works best.
8. Have Fun!
Yes, we all have important work to do and your audience is no different, but having a bit of fun with the content you present can set you apart. Depending on what you do of course, if you are selling estate planning services then your website will be different to a company selling rucksacks to teenagers. This will all have an impact on the tone and voice that you use.
If you want to find out a little more about content marketing then you might find this page about content marketing useful and of course you can always reach out to us for a chat by calling 01279 647003.