When it comes to building a company website, many business owners are naturally drawn to the visual elements. It should look sharp, have eye-catching imagery and graphics, as well as be mobile-friendly. However, in today’s marketplace, the content of a website has just as much value as the visual elements.
Having ample content that is well-written – grammatically and strategically – will serve several purposes:
- Customer Engagement – Tell people about your products and services, build your credibility and motivate them to take action.
- Branding – The tone and messaging of your content (i.e. your “voice”) is just as important to your overall brand as the visual elements.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search engines place a lot of value on quality content that incorporates strong keywords and tags. The content, however, must be unique to your site. Regular updates and additions are also beneficial to your SEO appeal.
So, how can you create more engaging content for your website? Here are some helpful tips:
- Speak to Your Customers
Identify your target audience and craft the content to speak to their needs, wants and desires. Provide useful information that they will seek out. The idea is to give visitors a reason to keep reading any page on your site. Also, try to focus on benefits more than product features. People are generally more interested in how something will help them more than how it works.
- Make Content Scannable
“Scannability” is key when you have a lot of content to sift through. Make your headlines memorable, and use subheadings, imagery and graphics to help break up long blocks of text. Even if your viewer doesn’t read every word, they should understand the key points.
- Focus on Quality
Make sure the content is well-written and proofread carefully. Having many typos and mistakes could work against you. Proper grammar will help viewers get a clearer understanding of your content and establish credibility.
- Incorporate Keywords (Carefully)
Yes, having focused keywords and phrases will help greatly with SEO. However, try not to overdo it. Using too many repetitive words and phrases could be at the expense of your content’s overall flow. There is a real art to strategically incorporating keywords, so tread carefully or consult with an expert like Red Mallard.
- Keep it Unique
Even if you are repurposing other articles and source information on your site, the verbiage needs to be as unique as possible. Do what you can to craft fresh content. Otherwise, the search engines will detect duplicate and heavily plagiarized text.
- Update and Add
Review your site’s content on a regular basis and make updates from time to time. Keeping your site fresh and searching for ways to add new content regularly can help with SEO. A great way to accomplish this without overloading your main site with too many new pages is to create an active blog, which our team of writers at Red Mallard can help you with.
- Have Calls to Action
Incorporate calls to action throughout the content. Once you’ve engaged a visitor, you want to push them toward taking whatever the next desired step is. Whether the call to action is downloading a white paper or purchasing a product, you don’t want your viewer to leave empty handed.
Creating engaging and effective web content doesn’t have to be difficult. Use your content to draw visitors in and compel them to act. When done right, you will drive more traffic to your site. For more information about web content and blogging, contact Red Mallard today.
