In the words of the Beegees – “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away…” and this statement is just as relevant to online content as it is to love poems penned under blossoming apple trees.
But why should you take the time to write your website content?
Writing Effective Website Content
Ask yourself what you, as a consumer, would want to read on a website. Then ask yourself, as a business owner, what information, tone and vibe you want to give to your customers.
Thinking from a different perspective helps when it comes to writing effective website content; aim to answer these key questions:
- How should your content read? Is the tone of your company formal, informal? How do you as a brand interact with your consumers?
- Do you have all the relevant information for that page or is there key content that has been missed off?
- Where are your calls to action and what do they say? A call to action (such as ‘Call us today to get your quote’ or ‘Check out the brand we’ve worked with’) feeds consumers through your website … meaning they will see more of your site and, hopefully, get in contact or purchase your goods.
- Is your content optimised for search engines? Read back through your content and highlight any keywords and phrases that appear in it (see below for more on this) – does your website content include enough mentions of keywords and phrases? Are there too many, so much so that the content doesn’t flow for a human reader?
Writing Website Content That Search Engines Can Read
You may ask what we mean by making your content ‘readable’ by search engine? The art of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to how your website ranks within search engines.
Your position, that is whether you are positioned first on page one or eighth on page two, is affected by the content on your website. This is not to say that search engines just look at your content; in fact there are many complicated algorithms in place that define your ranking, but having website content that is filled with keywords and phrases will help.
Choosing Effective Keywords and Phrases
Any keywords and phrases you use should be relevant to your industry and line of work as these are the terms people will be looking for when they wish to find your services.
Moreover, these are also the same terms search engines will rank you for – the more the content on your website refers to what you do, the more trusted your site will be by search engines. After all the primary goal of a search engine is to get people the information they are looking for.
How do you choose keywords and phrases though?
The easiest way to explain is to give you an example: Skills On Toast. As you’re probably aware, we provide web design and development services in Bristol and the surrounding areas.
Therefore we want to be ranking for the following terms:
- Bristol web design
- Bristol web development
- Web design and development in Bristol
- Web design agency Bristol
- Web developer in Bristol
The above is just an example of the terms we would go for; you can also target more in-depth terms relevant to your industry; examples for us being:
- Designing a website for a company
- Adding videos and images to a company website
- How to manage a company website
- How to freshen up a company website
- Content management help
Attempt to sum up your business in a couple of lines. Then sit down and think about what phrases from these sentences you would search for. You can also use tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool to aid your search for the most effective keywords and phrases.
Three Tips:
- Remember that search engine spiders (the technology that crawls your website) are clever creatures: do not try to cram your website with keywords and phrases just for the sake of it. Also, including a paragraph of keywords and phrases at the bottom of every page is known as Black Hat SEO and is ‘frowned upon’ by search engines.
- Each page has a different subject matter, this means each page will have different keywords and phrases, so make sure your content addresses this.
- Writing content for websites should not just be aimed at search engines: your customers are human so make sure any content that appears on your website is well written, grammatically correct and makes sense.
Oh, and if you happen to like the BeeGees song we referenced earlier, here’s a video … enjoy!
