How to write website content that works

The idea is to find potential search terms for your business or niche and incorporate them into your website content.

However, this is not a guessing game; it’s actually rather technical and involved. You need powerful tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to discover your content’s most relevant search terms.

Keyword selection

Thorough keyword research should yield an extensive list of potential search terms. However, not every keyword will deserve a spot in your content. This is where you must weed out the weaker keywords and narrow down on the most relevant ones.

For starters, go for keywords with a high search volume, low competition, and low keyword difficulty (KD).

Search volume shows how often a particular keyword is searched over a given period. KWs with higher search volumes tend to be more competitive.

Meanwhile, KD represents how easy or challenging it is to rank for a specific keyword. KD is typically scored on a scale of low-medium-high or 1-100. The higher the score, the more difficult it is for the keyword to rank on SERPs. For high-difficulty keywords, you’ll need more backlinks to compete in search results.

Keyword analytics tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz, all have standardized approaches to measuring keywords’ competitiveness based on KD, search volume, and other metrics.

Also, prioritize long-tail keywords over short-tail keywords. For example, “Professional cloud services for business” would be more targeted and less competitive than just “cloud services.”

Natural keyword usage

Once you’ve got your list of handpicked keywords, incorporate them into your website content as naturally as possible. Do this for all your content, including web copy, blog posts, and calls to action. Ensure your meta titles, meta descriptions, headers, and page URLs cite keywords as well.

Be careful not to overdo it though. Overstuffing content with keywords compromises readability. Also, search engines do not take kindly to keyword overuse.

Keyword updates

As time goes by, users’ search behavior shifts, new search terms emerge, and search algorithms change. This means that keyword effectiveness is somewhat dynamic. As such, you have to continuously measure and fine-tune your keyword performance in order for your content to remain visible to the target audience.

Create a content strategy

Come up with a solid plan for website content creation and distribution. The plan should answer these five questions:

1. What kind of content should I produce (blog posts, landing pages, white papers, product descriptions)?
2. How often should I publish content?
3. How will the content be structured, styled, and formatted?
4. What resources do I need to produce, publish, and maintain my content?
5. How will I know that my content strategy is successful?

Let’s get the ball rolling on content planning. First, ensure your content type, what’s in it, and how it’s presented align with your target audience and business goals. Second, create a consistent publishing calendar that’s reasonable for the kind of content you’ll be churning out. For example, blog posts should go out every week, while white papers and case studies are good once a month.

And finally, your choice of content will dictate the resources you’ll need. For starters, you may have to upgrade your website to handle all that content.

Build a clear structure for future materials

It’s important to make web content as consumable and digestible as possible. This means using language, tone, and structure that’s easy for your target audience to follow and understand.

Let’s start with the language. Every industry has its own language. For example, legal content reads very differently from tech copy. Write in a language that correlates to your industry; otherwise, readers might not take you seriously.

Next is the content structure. Blocks of text can be hard to follow and even off-putting. Break the content into sections punctuated by headings, bullet points, visuals, lists, etc. For long-form content, be sure to provide a guide, like a clickable table of contents, to help readers navigate the various sections. Doing this enhances readability and flow. It also makes the content look more appealing and organized.

Write content that is clear, engaging, and expert-level

You’ve probably read a book or article and felt like the author was really talking to you or thought they absolutely understood what they were on about. What makes a read so meaningful, relatable, and memorable?

A good web read has three main qualities:

Clarity

Write at your audience’s knowledge level. Relay ideas and messages in a way they’d understand, showcasing your expertise at the same time. That means avoiding jargon, deep industry references, and overly technical descriptions.

Expert-level writing

Content creation is a profession with a vast market currently worth $32.28 billion. If you’re doubtful about your content creation skills, you can always hire a professional content writer, videographer, or researcher, depending on the content you want.

An expert-level website content writer does more than just put words together. They are trained and experienced in reader targeting, keyword research, branding, content management, and more.

A great story

Everybody loves a good story. Storytelling is one of the things that make website content relatable on a human level, engaging, and memorable.

Base your content on a narrative—a neat story arc with a beginning and an end. It could be a challenge-resolution story that takes readers through relatable pain points and provides a lasting solution. Focus also on corporate storytelling, sharing the human stories behind your brand, like how it came to be, how far you’ve come, and the brilliant minds making it all possible.

Come up with captivating headlines

Did you know that the average internet user’s attention span is only 8.25 seconds? What’s more, internet users barely read. A study found that people are more likely to read only 20% of the text on a page. More recently, researchers reported that only 13% of web visitors are deep readers; the rest simply skim the content or navigate straight to the information they want.

How do you create content that captures such a narrow attention span and caters to the fleeting reading behavior? Well, you make the content scannable and attention-grabbing. You can do that by writing clear, punchy, and intriguing headlines and sub-titles.

Here are some tips for writing captivating headlines:

• Make headlines snappy and concise.
• Flag the reader in your headlines.
• Spark curiosity with questions.
• Include power words (words that incite an emotional response).
• Incorporate humor.
• Use specific numbers or data.
• Convey a sense of urgency or importance.
• Come up with a headline formula for every type of content.

Don’t forget about SEO

As much as you’re creating website content for human readers, keep SEO in mind. You can’t afford to ignore SEO. It’s essential in bringing eyeballs to your content.

Fortunately, optimizing content for online search is not that difficult; you only need to check the following boxes:

• Include relevant keywords in the material.
• Write keyword-rich meta descriptions and meta titles.
• Use images and graphics for visual descriptions.
• Add alt text to images, video, and audio.
• Include useful internal links throughout the copy.
• Add share buttons and a comment section.

Include powerful CTAs

Calls to action (CTAs) provoke or persuade readers to do something. The desired action should be one of your content goals. You might want readers to subscribe to your blog or newsletter, buy a product or service, share their thoughts and opinions, sign up for a program, or download a file—the list is endless.

To be effective, a CTA must employ actionable language, be related to the information or messaging on the web page, and be strategically positioned.

Let’s look at some examples of good CTAs:

Source: invoicesimple.com

Source: guildquality.com

Source: servicefusion.com

CTA positioning is crucial in converting leads. Work it into the page’s structure or weave it with the content’s narrative. It should be clear and attention-grabbing but not so much in the reader’s face. Also, write one main CTA for every page and have the page’s content lead up to it.

Add unique media

A block of plain text is a bland eyesore to many internet users. Plus, plain old text barely grabs any readers’ attention.

Spruce up your content with multimedia elements like images, graphics, and videos. Visuals liven up your text and make it seem richer and more interesting. They also enhance the reading experience by portraying what words cannot. For instance, video guides, live product demos, time-lapse videos, and explainer videos can relay vast amounts of information in a way that would be difficult or impossible to do with text.

Visual information is easier to process and understand too. And you can pack a lot of information in a single image or just a few seconds of video.

Include social proof

Social proof is a physiological phenomenon where individuals or groups tend to emulate the behavior or actions of others in certain situations. One such situation is when making purchase decisions. A customer would be more likely to buy if they knew that other people made the same purchase and were happy with the choice.

That’s why 95% of consumers read online reviews before buying. Some, 58%, would even be willing to pay more to buy from a brand with good reviews.

Leverage social proof with your website content. Incorporate user-generated material, such as testimonials, reviews, and case studies, into your content strategy. These will help you build trust and credibility around your brand and its offerings.

Link to related content

Internal links connect different pages on your website. They help search engines and users navigate the site more easily.

For search engines, internal links make it clear how your site is organized and help spread page authority. For example, if a popular page gets a lot of external traffic, it can pass some of that authority to other pages through internal links.

For users, internal links allow quick access to related content, improving navigation and encouraging them to explore more pages. This enhances the user experience and keeps visitors on your site for longer.

However, don’t just add links randomly. Poor internal linking can hurt navigation and SEO. Here are some tips:

• Link parent and child pages to each other.
• Add links to related content and new posts.
• Use relevant, keyword-rich anchor text.
• Avoid repeating anchor text for different links.
• Link to important pages (pillar pages).
• Create topic clusters with links.
• Regularly check your internal links.

Regularly update content on the website

Website content ages. If you’ve ever come across a seemingly old-fashioned blog or web page, it probably didn’t start off that way. Content can become outdated over time, losing touch with the audience, its goals, and even SEO algorithms.

That’s why it’s important to keep your website content looking fresh and crisp. Content updates also draw new attention to otherwise old ideas, information, or messages. Plus, they send signals to search engines indicating that you’re making efforts to keep the content relevant.

The good news is, updating content is much easier than creating new material from scratch. Reformatting, updating keywords, removing broken links, changing an image, or updating dates and figures might be all a piece of content needs to stay green.

Is your website letting your content strategy down?

Your web content might be spot-on, but your website, not so much. A poorly performing website is a big letdown for any web content strategy.

Let us assess your website for SEO, performance, UX, and functionality issues. We’ll check 31 critical aspects to identify areas of improvement, including:

• SEO
• Usability
• Outdated content
• Keywords
• Homepage content
• Loading speed
• Web resources

Learn more about our professional website audit services.

Conclusion

You must feel eager to break out the quill and ink after this empowering read. Not so fast though; start by understanding your target audience, setting your content goals, and drafting a success-oriented content strategy. Only then can you start writing high-quality content that resonates with readers and appeases search algorithms. That’s how you get far-reaching, engaging, and converting web content.

But why limit yourself to just text? Enrich your content with visual elements such as videos, infographics, and photos.

Remember, content management is an ongoing process. Monitor your website content closely, updating and improving it when necessary to keep it fresh and relevant.