Summary: Tips and ideas on writing content for your website.
Writing content for your website is never easy. Companies and, in particular, small businesses, have a certain knack of delaying their literature when it comes to their website.
For so many businesses the problem is what to write about. Many a tradesmen hit a type of writer’s block saying “What else can I write about?”
Content plays a crucial role in Internet marketing. Not only does it help users make informed decisions and convert visitors to sales, but it also plays a vital role in SEO for rankings and PPC for landing page conversions.
Content should be informative, easy to read, easy to follow, intuitive, and to the point!
Ideas for Content Creation
Although Elevate provides content for our clients, many businesses prefer to write their own copy. Here are a few ideas to creating content:
- Consider what makes your company unique, your services, and anything that stands out from the competition. Prices, offers, etc.
- Have a look for unused company literature. Sometimes, those leaflets and pamphlets have short bursts of text and bulleted lists that can be very helpful when expanded on.
- Add information on history and notable events within the company.
- Tips and tutorials. Sharing helpful advice relevant to your line of work goes a long way.
- FAQs are interesting and very good for generating leads online. Answering questions that are frequently asked removes doubt from the visitor, and less company time is wasted answering those questions.
What to look out for?
Check for errors. If possible, always have someone else review your content before going live. Misspellings, unintelligible and misleading text can easily drive potential customers away.
Keep pages short, simple, and to the point. Four to ten paragraphs are usually adequate. Try not to overload or bore visitors with long-winded text. Too short a text might be a wasted visit.
Another tip is to keep paragraphs short. Most users scan text for information to see what is written; long paragraphs do not contribute to that effect.
Another one to look out for: distractions. When writing content you need to set aside a few moments and commit yourself to pen and paper (or keyboard and screen, whatever makes you comfortable). Having distractions around might make things a tad slow and stop those creative juices from flowing.
Impact on your SEO
What to consider when search engines are involved:
Make sure your content is original and unique. For SEO, this is very important; if a considerable amount of text is not unique and taken from another site (or source), there is a possibility that search engines, and Google in particular, will simply ignore your content altogether.
Write for your audience and not for the search engines. If you are after a particular keyword, mentioning it only the few times should be enough – if you go crazy it could hurt your rankings.
Use synonyms for variety; this can benefit your site greatly, and you can even benefit from traffic that you never thought of before.
Prosper from Good Content
If you were to be more proactive with your writing, you could increase your website’s presence with a blog. Informative posts can return great traffic, turn visitors into followers, and generate repeatable custom.
Remember, great content goes a long way. Original content not only helps search engines and visitors naturally link to your site, but more importantly, it helps convert those hits.