15 Simple Tips For Effective Website Content Writing
The internet is a goldmine for online users who are looking for website content as a problem solver for the various issues they face every day. One of the most persuasive content formats is writing. We all know the power and influence of good writing. Clear impactful writing can help in creating a very successful website for your brand or business whatever it might be.
But there are a few conditions that have to be followed while writing content that is highly ranked and provides value to the readers. We have to remember the web world is swimming in the content of various nature.
Let’s consider some data available to us
According to Internet Live Stats, there are more than 1.9 billion websites, more than a whopping 3,5 billion google searches every day, and roughly 3,50000 tweets out there every minute.
In this vast pool of information, it is very difficult to catch someone’s notice. the key to successful website writing is to follow some simple rules that make the writing super effective with excellent returns on your investment.
In the Indian context, according to Statista Indian digital users as in January 2019 was 560 million users which increased from 460 million in 2018. Active mobile social media users are 310 million with their presence in one or more than one social media platform. Additionally, it is estimated that by 2021 there will be about 635.8 million internet users in India.
From the information provided above, it must be clear by now that businesses and enterprises need to come up with relevant targeted content with specific intentions to yield results.
A recent study by Pardot has revealed that more than 95% of consumers lose trust in a brand due to bad website content.
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How Is Website Content Writing Different From Other Forms Of Writing?
- Why website content writing is different from traditional writing?
The first thing to consider when preparing to write for the web is that it is very different from writing for any other medium. The sole important consideration for website writing is to feature in the search engine rankings. It is that ranking that will get you noticed. Bear in mind that when we are writing for a website, we are only emphasizing what our target group might be searching for on the net.
This is where we use keywords and phrases. These are words that our leads type in on the search box in a search engine. So whatever your area of expertise is, whatever topic you choose it all boils down to what your consumers look for on the web.
Some of the key features of website writing are :
Simplicity – the key to success in web writing is simplicity in conveying your message
Length – Cut down long sentences comprising more than 20 words. Search engines find it difficult to assess long-formed sentences.
Transition words – Thus, therefore, hence, additionally, these are known as transition words. They help in connecting sentences giving a cause and effect model to your writing. Incorporate more such words in your writing to improve readability
Different consecutive sentences – Do not use the same word at the starting of three or more consecutive sentences. They have a jarring effect on online users and search engines do not appreciate it either.
Paragraph length – Make short paragraphs delineating the important points.
Readability factor – Take a readability score for your content. They can give you a fair idea of how user-friendly your content is. The Flesch reading scale along with other readability tools can direct you to write content that is popular with the masses.
Subheadings – Add subheadings for a smooth flow in your write-up. Subheadings give a neat look to your content.
Don’t aim for wordy explanations on a particular subtext. Rather, use your words to draw the reader in. Let them experience what you want to tell them. Exposition sometimes takes away the curiosity factor in the content. Provide graphics, charts, and word clouds in your content for variety.
15 Tips For Impactful Content Writing For Website
Pick a niche
We have often heard of the term Niche. What exactly is a niche in marketing strategy parlance? A niche is a specific market that has its unique characteristics, requirements, products, services as well as customers. you need to have a popular niche as the subject matter of your website. That is a fundamental requirement for your website to get ranked on Google or any other search engine.
Some of the most popular niches are White papers, long-form blog posts, case studies, Finance (One of the eternally popular contents out there), Ebooks, technology, etc.
Some profitable niche ideas are for website content are:
Lifestyle, fitness, home decor, grooming, how to make money online/offline, technical as well as technological writers, business plan writers, and so on.
Selecting a niche can do you a world of good especially when you are starting your own website. Carry out vigorous research on the niches that are in demand in the online business. Align it with your interest and acumen. And there you’ve got it! You got a niche to start writing on.
Having a niche gives you certain credibility over writers who write on all topics. Some customers want your expertise in a specific field or subject. Concentrating on a particular area will give you the benefit of thorough knowledge of that subject.
The result- happy satisfied customers who are even willing to promote your product through word-of-mouth.
Research your audience
A primary requirement before attempting to write on a topic is to know your target audience. Who is it that you are trying to influence through your writing? Your content should be in line with the demands and expectations of your target group.
Keep a broader perspective when you are researching your audience. Mirror your target group on the different social media and networking channels that you surf. Your primary audience might be able to bring in new leads that can successfully turn into conversions.
For Instance, when you are writing on a business plan for your client, there can be another audience for you as well. They can be in the form of business journals, start-ups even students of business. Share your website link on every platform to gain maximum visibility.
Always use a keyword search for Search engine optimization
As mentioned earlier in this article, the search engine is the most relevant factor for the visibility and familiarity of a website online. And the keyword is the determinant of success for a website.
As mentioned by Marketing Guru Neil Patel, Keyword is the most essential element in digital marketing. Keyword research gives you a good understanding of what words and topics are relevant to your focus group. As a thumb rule, always incorporate popular keywords in your article for ranking on the SERP of a search engine.
Simple succinct sentences
Remember, you are catering to an audience who might not have the technical expertise or might not be familiar with complex words and abbreviations. Keep your sentences simple and express them with clarity. There is no point in writing long convoluted sentences. Your audience will not have the time or patience to read such articles. The key is to write keeping in mind the high school level of comprehension. That way it is easier for everyone to read.
Take, for example, A person is going through your content on a bus or train. They will not be inclined to read complicated words that they need to consult the dictionary for. Write words that are easy to understand.
Make sure your work is not a plagiarised version
This is a basic point for everyone to follow, yet a lot of times we see that creators blatantly copy others’ work naming it their own. Sometimes it happens that a writer does it unknowingly. There are a lot of common phrases and words we use in our everyday language which we incorporate in our content. We hardly realize they can be an elemental of Plagiarism.
To avoid any kind of duplication make sure to run your work through the different Plagiarism detector tools available on the like internet. Some of these tools come absolutely free and some come with premium features for a paid subscription.
Some well-known Plagiarism detectors are
Smallseotools, Grammarly Plagiarism checker, Duplichecker, Pre-post SEO plagiarism checker, Plagspotter, Siteliner, etc.
Run your work through one or more of these tools to check for any unwanted duplication.
We may be unsure as to how to create unique content since a large proportion of articles on the web are similar in nature. They are composed of the same set of words. And there’s so much you can innovate from those points.
The best thing when writing is to provide a personal touch in your writing. Your experiences are unique to you. They can never be similar to someone else. Even when you’ve interacted with a known brand, a lot of people might have written about that same brand but your experience is unique. Therefore sharing your own perception can be a fresh approach towards writing content related to that brand and its product. It will also add the required human element to your content.
Plagiarism has very serious consequences. There can be elaborate lawsuits resulting in the cancellation of your website. Be cautious and create something new.
Always use active voice
The active voice is friendly. You want to leave a positive impression on your leads when they visit your site. Writing in an active voice feels like you have a connection with the reader. Instead of saying “Adverbs should not be used.” you can say “Do not use adverbs.” which gives a familiarity to the whole article and your target consumers feel more at ease when you write in an active voice.
Make website content conversational
This is a corollary of the point above. Get your readers to relax when they read your article. Share insights and anecdotes that help to build rapport with your existing and potential customers. It must feel like you are right there having a conversation with them regarding the problem. Do not come across as someone preachy. Keep the tone natural and unpretentious.
Incorporate content format mix
Though your primary way of attracting leads is by way of engaging, informational text, do use other formats of website content to make your copy even more interesting. A page full of text can become monotonous. And you can lose your leads by putting too much emphasis on the write-ups. Visuals have a great impact on the mind. It also helps in retaining information clearly. Therefore, a combination of graphs, charts, and infographics can result in better engagement.
Keyword stuffing is an absolute no in website content
Using keywords for Google and other search engines to rank your website is a good thing but do not stuff keywords randomly in your content. When you use too many keywords google considers it spamming. As a result, even if your content is otherwise informative and helpful, Google will not rank your content. If you fail to make it to the first few links on the first page of a search engine your content will most likely go unnoticed.
Hyperlink Sources for website content
You might want to use facts and figures from different websites that calculate the figures corresponding to surveys, website performances, and a host of other metrics. To provide authenticity to your article, make sure to provide hyperlinks to those sites. It builds trust among your consumers as well as with the sites you refer to. Citations are quite important and desirable provided you give the link to the source.
11. Employ SEO best practices
Seo best practices are those pertinent points in creating content that aligns with the best search engine practices. Abiding by these rules, you can easily rank on the SERP pages of a search engine.
Some of the important points of SEO Practices are:
- Meta Description – A meta description is a fixed number of words in approximately 155 words that help to understand what your content is about. It highlights the main points of your article and helps in better placement of your website on the results page.
- Title tags: it is the clickable HTML Title or headline that is displayed on a page of the search engine. It is used to navigate to the page of the content.
- Internal links: These are used to give the other relevant elements on your website exposure to the online users. When you provide internal links, it takes you to another article, post, or page on the same website.
- Outbound links are links to other sites that you can provide for a better understanding of where you got the information from.
- keyphrase: These are the arrangement or combination of words in your content that the user would use to search for a particular topic on Google. Use the key phrase in your content at least a couple of times for a better ranking.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular search engine optimization tools. It is an absolute favorite with website developers and business organizations. They are user-friendly and measure the level of your readability in correct precise terms.
Try it out if you haven’t already
Scannable text
What is scannable content? It is the type of content that can benefit consumers even when they scan through the content without reading it entirely. Scannable content is those which do not beat around the bush and get to the point directly. They are coherent and lucid. The main points are clearly highlighted and explained. The texts have a clear readable font, great headings, and subheadings.
We need to create scannable website content so that readers have clarity when they are on your website. Highlight the main points, refine your writing. Aim for brevity in your writing. Nielsen’s study found more than 75% of people scan web pages. Bolster your content with facts and figures. Memory helps retain figures better. Do not brag about an achievement. Try to look at your content with objectivity. Weave your content around your main points in such a way that the consumer can cull information from the body of the text. Keep plenty of whitespace between different components to make it convenient for the readers to go through it.
Inverted pyramid Method
This is a very popular metaphor recommended primarily by journalists while describing the importance of formatting a news story or an important article. The inverted pyramid method, however, applies to all writers across every channel. According to buffer.com 55%, people read your content for 15 secs or less. By that calculation, you can imagine how much of your copy hoes unread if you cant capture the attention of your readers within those 15-20 secs.
The inverted pyramid method of writing advises us to write down the most important points at the beginning followed by descriptions of those important points. Finally, you can write about the general elements of a topic that doesn’t require much attention. This way, your key points are always highlighted in your content copy and it helps to get leads for conversion. A very effective method of putting this inverted pyramid method to good use is to create bullet points or lists for your topic. Write them down in the beginning before explaining each in detail. Be careful to use apt short words for the bullet list. This format captures the reader’s attention and they stay with your content for the rest of the details.
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Make every page presentable
Going through website content is very different from reading a journal or a book. Those formats of content are synchronized and put in chronological order. But where websites are concerned you have different layers to a website in the form of different pages and posts. These posts are not interconnected and can be read standalone. Therefore, you have to make sure that each post and page is designed well. Make sure the font is legible and clean. Sometimes you can hyperlink other sites or give links to other pages of your own site(internal links) for a topic. This helps in better engagement of leads.
An overall clean website impacts the user positively. If your work is clutter-free your clients will know that they can trust you with their work. Thus, you must have a clean well-managed website for promoting your work.
Create compelling CTA
Write a copy that prompts a user to take action based on the quality of your content. Make sure you know what you want to achieve through your CTA content. It can be to garner more subscriptions, to appraise your consumers of white papers and e-books from your business, or to derive sales.
Examples of CTAs for website content are as follows:
- Newsletter Subscription– The user is asked to provide their details in the form of their email id and further information is provided to the user through e-mail.
- Subscriptions– this is also a very popular element of CTA whereby a person is asked to subscribe to the website in exchange for an ebook. The ebook generally contains guidelines and details that are of importance to the user.
- Demo Videos – Sometimes a company provides a free demo session to showcase what they have to offer. Based on that demo, the consumer has the option to decide on making a purchasing decision. This is true in the case of courses that are mostly online IIMSKILLS provides a free demo for potential students who can sign up than to learn Content writing.
- Discount and sale offer – A business enterprise offers a discount or coupon code to prospective customers if and when they sign up for the services. Based on the feasibility of the offer, the consumer can decide to make a purchasing decision.
- Time-bound deals: Sometimes CTAs come with a time-bound deal that induces a sense of urgency. Based on the value a customer might derive from such deals the customer might be willing to invest.
Sound confident and be sure to use an active voice when communicating a CTA. That makes it more effective and impactful. Moreover, you can give a clickable link to different social media channels that are available with almost all SEO tools. They help in making your content accessible to an even larger number of people.
Conclusion
Impactful website content needs meticulous planning and detail. You need an organized well thought out strategy. Additionally, you should emphasize the key elements that contribute to the success of a website. Content writers are constantly evolving along with the new technologies that are introduced. They are now adept at identifying the issues faced by consumers and strive to create content catering to their demands. Be true to your content when you are creating it. That is the secret potion to writing persuasive website content.
