How to Write Content for Your Website

What’s the best way to write content for your website?

Your website is the image of your business on the internet.

Whether you use it for eCommerce, marketing your physical store, or both, the site plays a crucial role in the success and growth of your business.

However, while having a well-designed and responsive website is vital in building a positive brand image, it’s the content that draws and retains customers.

Website content attracts, engages, informs, nurtures, and converts customers.

Search engines rely on the content to index and rank your site; website visitors connect with your business through the content; customers learn about your products/services from reading your content. In a nutshell, your online presence revolves around content.

Sadly, most of the content brands publish does not add value to them.

A study found that 58% of the content created by brands is not meaningful to consumers.

It’s a sad reality that drives many marketers to learn how to create effective content.

Of which, as a past state of marketing survey revealed, 96% of marketing decision-makers confirmed that content marketing was effective for their brand.

In other words, creating effective content for your business should be a priority.

Otherwise, you risk producing copy that does not drive the desired customer engagement, thereby missing the opportunity to reach a ready market while losing resources (money and time) in the process.

Whether you’re creating your foundational pages (home page, about page, services/products page, contact page), blog posts, eBooks, white papers, or case studies, the copy should grab your readers’ attention and compel them to respond to your calls to action.

This post shows you how to write compelling website content that makes your clients want to buy from you.

Inside

• Importance of Creating Content for Your Website
• Tips for Writing Successful Content for Your Website
• Develop Your Buyer Personas
• Set Content Goals
• Use a Content Calendar
• Conduct Keyword Research
• Craft a Compelling Copy
• Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice
• Avoid Hard Selling
• Use Writing Tools
• Leverage Visuals
• Optimize the Content for SEO
• Audit Your Content Regularly

Importance of Writing Content for Your Website

The truth is that creating effective content is labour-intensive and time-consuming.

However, as the stat mentioned above reveals, almost all business leaders investing in content marketing admit it bears fruit.

But aren’t there alternatives?

Most businesses spend so much time and money creating content just to raise brand awareness and boost sales?

Why not just stick to the old sales and marketing activities like TV, radio, and print media ads?

While paid ads still have their place in marketing, website content has proven much more effective in winning and converting the digital-era consumers, not forgetting it’s more cost-effective.

According to statistics published by Demand Metric, 70% of people would rather learn about a business by reading its content than from an advert.

For a better appreciation of why content is useful for your business, consider these reasons.

• It educates your audience – Whether you blog about a brand-related topic, create a tutorial, or share a case study, informative content engages and educates the audience making it easier to win their trust. As statistics have shown, 90% of consumers find custom content useful. (Demand Metric)
• It creates trust – Besides educating customers, informative content helps build trust. Publishing content that focuses on answering a customer’s query without demanding anything in return wins their trust, making them more likely to respond to your call to action. According to research, 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content. (Demand Metric)
• It establishes you as a thought leader in your industry – Publishing informative content regularly positions you as a thought leader in your industry, which earns the respect of potential and existing customers.
• It boosts your SERP rankings – While the primary aim of creating content is to engage your customers and nurture them to conversion, quality content helps boost your SERP rankings, increasing your discoverability. If the content is helpful to your readers, the search engines take note and index it more.
• It increases website traffic – If you create valuable content, your audience is likely to share it with their followers, which can increase your website traffic.
• It generates more leads and conversions – Content marketing is a strategy whose ultimate goal is to boost conversions. Publishing quality content regularly helps generate more leads that you can nurture to conversion.

11 Tips for Writing Successful Content for Your Website

Indeed, your business website requires excellent content.

With over 5 billion people using the internet, your site opens you to a huge ready market (thanks to targeting technology).

And even for brick-and-mortar businesses that don’t sell online, their website plays a significant role in boosting their local SEO.

As statistics have shown, 50% of people who conduct a local business search visit the store within a day.

In essence, we cannot overemphasize the importance of leveraging your website to promote your business.

So let’s go ahead and unpack the tips to help you craft successful content.

Develop Your Buyer Personas for Your Website

A buyer persona is a description of your target customer – their name, demographic details, behavioural traits, interests, etc.

Your business can have one or several buyer personas.

Even if you offer a single product/service, you might need to create several personas since the customers could be buying the product for different reasons.

Why Create a Buyer Persona for your Website Content?

Creating the personas helps you better understand your customer(s) to customize the content to meet their specific needs.

In other words, personas help make your content customer-focused, which is more appealing to the target audience than focusing on what you offer.

At the same time, you get to personalize the content for each of your audience segments to boost engagement.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

You may not be able to go out and meet every potential customer to learn more about their qualities and what motivates them to buy from you.

However, you can still get relevant information to create an ideal fictional customer(s). Here is how you go about it.

Research your audience

Start by reviewing your existing customer data. Use your social and website analytics to get their age, language, location, interests, income, challenges, etc. On the same note, research your competitors to find who they’re targeting using tools like Buzzsumo.

Identify your customers’ goals and pain points

What are your customers’ motivations? What do they seek to achieve by purchasing your product or services? This hints into the problems they’re trying to solve by acquiring the product/service.

You can find answers to these questions by talking to your sales and customer service teams or engaging in social listening.

The latter involves tracking your brand mentions or conversations around similar products/services to find what the customers are saying.

Understand how you can help

After visualizing your ideal customer and their situation, think about how you can assist them.

How can your product/service help them overcome their challenge and achieve their goals?

That benefit should be your value proposition, and it should resonate with the ideal customer.

Create the buyer personas

From the information you have gathered, group the customers based on common characteristics to create unique buyer personas.

For instance, each persona should have a (fictional) name, job title, home, and defining characteristics.

Set Content Goals

Once you have created your buyer personas, the next step is to set your content goals.

Setting goals is essential as it helps provide direction and keep you focused.

Moreover, measuring results becomes much easier when you work towards specific goals.

This way, you can assess the effectiveness of your efforts (learn what is working and what is not) and optimize your strategy accordingly.

Ideally, your goals may vary depending on your business and marketing strategy. But here are some common content goals;

• Higher SERP rankings – Content helps you get discovered and ranked by search engines. If your goal is to boost your SERP rankings, you should ensure your content is optimized for SEO. This means you should publish high-quality content with relevant keywords and do so regularly. If you have a physical store, you should create more local content to better your local SEO.
• Increase brand awareness – You can also use content to raise your brand awareness. For example, publishing high-quality content regularly increases your chances of ranking high on SERPs, thereby getting discovered by more people. Also, your audience could share the content with their followers, leading to increased brand awareness.
• Lead generation – High-quality content is an effective lead generation tool. Whether it’s an informative blog post, case study, eBook, white paper, or tutorial, quality content attracts more leads, opening an opportunity for you to nurture and convert them.
• Boost conversions – According to statistics, 60% of consumers are inspired to look for a product after reading content about it. Ideally, strategic content helps boost conversions. Nowadays, people prefer learning more about a product/service they’re interested in by searching for relevant content online. Thus, by producing high-quality content, you can net customers who are already searching with a buying intent.
• Build trust and credibility – Publishing quality content can help you win your audience’s trust and build your credibility. By providing valuable content without taking anything in return, the prospects are likely to trust your word, which can lead to a rewarding relationship.
• Strengthen your brand authority – You could also use content to build your brand authority. Positioning yourself as a trusted source of information can get your content ranked more by search engines. And as more people discover the content, you become a reputable industry expert, strengthening your brand authority.
• Audience retention – Acquiring new customers costs multiple times more than retaining existing customers. And for marketers, content has proven an effective strategy for customer retention. Content provides a means to stay in touch with your customers. You can send them more valuable content regularly, remind them about upcoming events and offers, etc. Constant communication keeps them engaged with your brand, which enhances their chances of considering your products/services whenever the need arises.
• Cultivate brand loyalty – Loyal customers are an asset to any business. In most cases, they show their pride and commitment to your brand by talking about it to their friends and family. If you publish high-quality content, your loyal customers are likely to share it with their connections to show their commitment. But more so because they appreciate the value you provide to them and would like their friends and family to experience it too.

Use a Content Calendar for Your Website

Essentially, a content calendar is a schedule that helps plan upcoming content.

It shows where and when you plan to publish and details the workflow, allowing for a coordinated content production process.

Usually, you can create the calendar on a simple spreadsheet or a cloud-based calendar software based on the scale of your content needs.

Why Do You Need a Content Calendar?

Having a content calendar is vital as it helps you remain consistent.

It provides a clear framework, enabling you to balance your topics, create content consistently, and save time.

In a nutshell, a content calendar helps you;

• Establish a process for creating content
• Determine when and where you will publish the content
• Foster collaboration among teammates involved in the content creation
• Publish content consistently to keep your brand in front of the customers

What Are the Elements of a Content Calendar?

The elements of a content calendar may vary slightly based on your business and content strategy. But some key features include;

• Content form (infographics, images, videos, audio, blog posts)
• Title/subject
• Focus keyword
• Notes/research
• Creator/voice
• Target audience goal
• Deadlines (draft completion date, final completion date, target publication date)

How to Create the Content Calendar

First, you need to identify the platform where you want to create the calendar.

This could be Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Asana, Monday, Trello, Mintent, HubSpot, etc. Once on the platform, here are the steps you should follow.

1. List your content ideas
2. Choose a publication frequency
3. Fill in your dates using the list of ideas according to the frequency established

Important note: You should balance your content types to leverage the power of each. While blog posts will be your most frequent copy, publishing a mix of content types such as case studies, eBooks, white papers, etc., helps increase your brand authority and boost your overall content marketing effectiveness.

Conduct Keyword Research To Write Content For Your Website

Before preparing any content, you should start by conducting keyword research.

Keywords are phrases that web users type on the search engine to find the content of their interest.

For instance, if you want to learn the meaning of content optimization, you would probably type ‘what is content optimization on the search bar. In this case, ‘what is content optimization’ is the keyword phrase. After entering the query, the search engine populates results with all the relevant articles written to explain the meaning of content optimization.

Keyword research, therefore, is the process of analyzing the search terms people use to find your content/products/services/business to optimize the copy to rank for those phrases.

In other words, you find popular phrases that people use to search for content related to the topic you want to write about. Once you include those keywords in your posts, the search engines can rank the content whenever people search for the terms.

Ideally, there are short-tail keywords (containing one or two terms) and long-tail keywords (containing three or more terms). Short-tail keywords are general, while long-tail keywords are more specific.

For instance, if you wanted to find a coffee shop; probably, you would enter the phrase ‘coffee shop’ on the search engine.

Usually, Google refines the results by suggesting the coffee shops nearest to your location.

If you’re planning to travel to another city and are scouting for amenities beforehand, you should enter a more location-specific phrase to get relevant results. E.g., if you plan to visit Tofino and are still in Toronto, you should search for ‘best coffee shops in Tofino’ for location-specific suggestions.

In this case, ‘coffee shop’ is a short-tail keyword, while ‘best coffee shops in Tofino’ is a long-tail keyword.

Why Is Keyword Research Important for Your Website?

Essentially, keyword research helps you understand what your target audience is searching for so you can create optimized content to increase your visibility. Moreover, creating content that people are looking for provides value to your website visitors, thereby initiating a relationship that you can cultivate to convert them into customers.

How to Do Keyword Research

Keyword research has three main elements – relevance, authority, and volume. Google ranks content based on relevance to the search query and prioritises sources that it deems authoritative.

In other words, other than sprucing relevant keywords on your content, you should ensure the content is informative and valuable to the readers. Otherwise, your site authority can drop drastically if the readers leave your site too soon for lack of the information they were looking for.

On the same note, you should aim for keywords with a considerable search volume. Even if you rank well for particular keywords and the search volume is too low, it means you won’t be getting traffic from the search engines.

That said, here are the steps to guide your keyword research.

1. Consider the search intent – What’s the search intent of your visitors or their purpose of online search. The four types of search intent include informational (looking for information), navigational (trying to find your website), transactional (searching for products/services to buy), and commercial (researching to find deals to buy in the future).
2. Conduct keyword research – Using a keyword research tool, enter topic-related short phrases as seed keywords (e.g., content optimisation) to find or get inspiration for long-tail keywords. There are free and paid keyword research tools you can choose from – Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, KWFinder, Ahrefs, SEMrush, KeywordTool.io, etc.
3. Analyze the competition – If the competition of your target keywords is too high, ranking for those terms might be pretty difficult. On the other hand, low-difficulty keywords might be easy to rank for, but you need to check their search volume to ensure it’s not too low. The best strategy is to choose medium-difficulty keywords and then craft quality content for higher page authority.
4. Choose the best keywords – Once you have a list of possible keywords, you need to choose the best and optimise the content around them.
5. Map keyword clusters – Sometimes, you will get related suggestions for the same seed keyword. As writing content for each of those keywords may be repetitive, the best way is to cluster closely related keywords and use them in the same post.
6. Determine the content format – After settling for the keywords you will use, you can search Google using those phrases and review the top results. This will give you insight into the best format to adopt for your posts – lists, infographics, images, etc.

Write Compelling Copy For Your Website

All the preceding steps are just prerequisites for crafting an effective copy.

They are essential steps, but they bear fruit only if you create a compelling copy.

Ideally, your copy is the media through which your readers interact with your brand.

If it’s not compelling enough to captivate their interest and get them to respond to your call to action, your prior efforts will all be a waste.

I.e., you may have nailed the buyer persona, have your content goals defined, produced content consistently courtesy of a content calendar, and attracted the ideal customer thanks to brilliant keyword research, but if the copy does not deliver your message compellingly, then it’s loss.

So, how do you work up a compelling copy to net your website visitors?

Here is how.

Write A Compelling Headline For Your Website

The headline is one of the most crucial parts of the copy.

It’s what gets people to click and read your content.

If it’s not interesting enough or relevant to what they’re searching for, they scroll down to the next result on the SERP. It’s that serious.

In other words, your headlines are the make or break factor for your content wherever you share your links.

In fact, only 20% of people read past the headline; the rest, 80%, don’t read the rest of the copy.

Hence, the importance of crafting compelling and click-worthy headlines whenever you’re preparing a piece of content.

However, it’s equally vital that the headlines not only capture the attention of potential visitors but should also frame the story of your copy.

Meaning that the body of the copy should deliver whatever you promise on the headline.

Otherwise, if it’s misleading, readers will feel shortchanged and leave in search of more relevant content.

Not only can this harm your brand credibility, but search engines can flag your site for misleading visitors and stop ranking it.

According to ClickGiant, a powerful headline should achieve the following effects;

• Generate a need for knowledge
• Create a sense of urgency
• Begin the message
• Build a relationship

Once you create a compelling headline, consider analyzing it on a headline analyzer tool to measure its strength.

Some examples of popular tools include Sharethrough, CoSchedule, Capitalize My Title, MonsterInsights, etc.

For instance, our post’s title ‘How to Write Content for Your Website’ scores a 72 at MonsterInsights.

According to MonsterInsights, a good headline score should be between 40 and 60, but you should aim for 70 and above for best results.

Write an Outline For Your Website

Creating an outline for your posts is helpful in many ways.

First, having a structure for your content helps organize your thoughts.

This is important as it ensures you include all the essential information to deliver your message effectively.

Second, an outline helps you stay on track, which enhances the flow of the content. In other words, you get to build on your core message without losing focus, leading to a more impactful call to action.

Also, with an outline, you write your content faster, consequently saving time and effort.

According to Convince & Convert, your team can follow these steps when creating post outlines.

• Decide on a topic
• Brainstorm your talking points
• Organize your ideas
• Expand on your key points
• Step back to view the big picture

Hook Readers With a Catchy Intro

A catchy intro is as important as a compelling headline.

It captivates a reader’s interest to continue reading.

A well-thought intro should set the tone of the rest of the blog and hook the reader.

In other words, it should assure your audience that the post will deliver what the headline has promised.

For instance, you could ask a question in your opening line, tell a story, use a shocking quote, or share an interesting fact.

After the first line, Quick Sprout advises that you should have something unique to say and speak directly to the reader while explaining the post’s purpose.

To help you hone this, here are the tips HubSpot offers.

• Keep the introduction brief
• Keep your first sentence short
• Don’t repeat the title
• Use second person ‘you’ at least once
• Articulate what the article covers in 1-2 sentences
• Explain why the article is important in 1-2 sentences
• Speak about a concern/challenge your reader might have
• Include a stat or a fact

Write Scannable Copy for Your Website

Less than 20% of people read website content word for word, meaning the rest of your visitors are only going to skim through your content.

That’s why it’s so important to make your content scannable.

Otherwise, if your readers can’t find the information they’re looking for by quickly scanning through the copy, they are likely to press the back button in search of easier-to-consume content.

So, how do you write scannable content?

Follow these tips.

• Use (attention-grabbing) subheadings to break up the post
• Stick to one idea per paragraph and keep the paragraphs short
• Keep your sentences short
• Use numbered lists and bullets
• Leave ample whitespace

Write Engaging Content 

Engaging content is more about the flow of your ideas than the aesthetics.

However, both elements are necessary to deliver an engaging and compelling message.

Ideally, besides being easy to consume, engaging content should be insightful. It should capture your readers’ attention and keep them interested to continue reading.

One of the most effective ways to create engaging content is to make it conversational.

The reader should feel as if they’re talking to a friend.

But as we have mentioned above, there are other essential elements that boost your content’s engagement factor.

Generally, here are tips to employ to make your content engaging;

• Be conversational
• Be clear and concise
• Add graphics
• Use sub-headers
• Use lists
• Format for wisely

Be Clear and Concise on your Website 

Clear and concise copy is crucial to the success of your website content.

It helps your customers understand your message better without pausing to figure out what you’re trying to say.

Remember, most readers on your website are there to skim through the content, pick the most crucial information and get moving.

If your content is clear and concise, allowing the readers to scan through it quickly and get a hold of the information they’re after, you can rest assured they’ll appreciate the favour.

As a rule of thumb, avoid using unnecessary words to convey your message.

For example, don’t use nine words if you can express your idea in five words. Again, once done writing, always revise the copy and rewrite your sentences where necessary for clarity.

Avoid Jargon on your website

Jargon may make you sound sophisticated, but it alienates your readers.

It’s something you want to avoid in your content marketing at all costs unless you’re a B2B with industry experts as your target customers.

Whenever a reader comes across a word(s) they don’t understand, their focus shifts from grasping your message to figuring out the meaning of the strange word. In other words, they tune out of the conversation.

If you spruce up your post with many such words, you end up with a frustrated reader rather than a hot lead.

As a matter of principle, use simple language in your content.

Whenever you have to use a difficult word, search for a simpler synonym and replace the word.

On the same note, if you have to use acronyms and abbreviations such as ROI, ensure you write out the meaning of the initials (return on investment) after the abbreviation to help the audience relate to your message better.

Conclude With a Summary

Including a summary in your copy is equally important.

If someone doesn’t have time to skim through all the content, the summary should provide a rough idea of the post’s key takeaways.

In other words, the summary should be a rundown of what you have covered in the copy.

Add a Call to Action on your website

Finally, after putting in all the work, you need to reap the benefits.

As we mentioned earlier, your content should have goals, and the last part of the copy is your opportunity to hammer that goal home – the call to action.

What would you like the reader to do? Package your request in a compelling call to action to get them to act.

If you have done your work well, capturing their interest with the rest of the copy, you can expect a better response on your call to action.

Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice

Maintaining a consistent brand voice boosts your content efforts immensely.

First, it helps optimise first impressions by projecting a consistent message no matter where and how your customers encounter the brand.

At the same time, it distinguishes you in your industry as customers can recognise you from a sea of other competitors.

So, how can you maintain a consistent brand voice?

Grammarly offers the following tips;

• Create a written style guide
• Make it easy to understand
• Revisit and revise it regularly
• Make it accessible
• Ensure your brand voice aligns with your business values and services
• Review external communications regularly to align them with the style guide

Avoid The ‘Hard Sell’ on your website

Hard selling is usually focused on the product, not the customer.

Unfortunately, when it comes to content marketing, hard-selling pushes customers away.

That’s why employing the strategy in your content is more likely to lose you more potential customers than convert new ones.

Note that it still has its place in your business strategy.

But content marketing works best with soft-selling as it focuses on building long-term relationships with customers over time.

As a rule of thumb, your website content should focus on soft-sell. I.e., cultivating a relationship with your customers while subtly showing them how they can benefit from your products/services.

Use Writing Tools

After crafting the copy, you should run it through various writing tools before sharing it with your readers.

Ideally, writing tools are a must-have companion for effective writing.

For instance, Grammarly helps correct grammar mistakes. Hemingway allows you to improve your sentence flow and readability, Copyscape checks your text for plagiarism, and headline analysers empower you to write more powerful headlines.

Besides refining your content, writing tools help you polish your writing skills over time. So, ensure you’re leveraging the available tools to craft credible content for better results.

Leverage Visuals on Your Website

In the wake of the enormous visual content success, you have probably heard this statement repeatedly – we process visual content better (actually 60,000 times faster) than text.

The success of visual content is irrefutable and, for good reasons – it grabs people’s attention, communicates information more effectively, and is easy to understand and remember. In other words, visuals generate more views for your content.

Including visuals in your content – graphics, videos and presentations, etc. – is one sure way of making your posts more appealing to attract and engage more readers and achieve your content goals.

Optimize your written website content for SEO

Before publishing the content, you need to optimise it for SEO.

If you’re using WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can be a handy tool.

But whether you’re on WordPress or not, ensure you learn the basics of optimising content for search engines to create better-ranking content.

Here are a few tips to start you off.

• Use 1-2 long-tail keywords
• Use keywords throughout the post
• Page title and SEO title
• Subheadings
• Introduction
• Body text (in moderation)
• Image alt text
• Meta description
• URL slug
• Optimize for mobile devices
• Include image alt text
• Link to related blog posts
• Review metrics regularly
• Publish evergreen content
• Update existing content

Audit Your Website Content Regularly

A content audit is the process of analyzing your website content.

The purpose of conducting a content audit is to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy and workflows and then optimize them to meet your marketing goals.

In other words, a content audit enables you to manage your time and resources better and ultimately improve the content quality and performance.

How do you conduct a content audit?

Consider these tips from SEMrush.

• Define your goals
• Take inventory of your content
• Categorise and analyze your content
• Draw an action plan based on your goals
• Adjust your content marketing strategy

If you like, there are both free and paid tools that you can use to audit your content. Examples include Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Google Analytics, and WooRank.

Conclusion: Write Content for your Website

With most of the content created by brands being ineffective, learning how to create website content that makes your clients want to buy from you is essential.

Among other benefits, excellent content helps increase your SERP rankings and website traffic, generates more leads, educates your audience, builds trust, establishes you as a thought leader in your industry, and boosts conversions.

Some tips for creating successful content include developing your buyer personas, setting content goals, using a content calendar, conducting keyword research, crafting a compelling copy, maintaining a consistent brand voice, avoiding hard-selling, using writing tools, leveraging visuals, optimizing the content for SEO, and performing regular content audits.

As you implement these tips, you should expect your content to become more effective, even as you realize your different content goals.