6 Steps to Effective Web Content

Is your web content so boring it even makes kittens fall asleep?

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Writing for your website is different than writing a press release, blog, or email newsletter. If you want your content to draw people in and keep them interested, it has to include a few key ingredients. Persuasive, interesting, and well-written web content can help convert web traffic into paying customers and ensure that your company comes across as both professional and credible.

1. Your first step is to do a little research on your target audience. If you know who you’re writing for, you can tailor your content to match. Depending on what you discover in your research, you may learn that your audience is driven by emotion and creative content that moves them to contact you will be your best bet. If they’re a technical audience, statistics, graphs, and figures might be more appropriate.


2. Search engine optimization is going to be an essential ingredient to the success of your website and business as a whole. You can use Google’s keyword tool – AdWords to conduct research on which keywords and/or phrases are searched the most. Using broad keywords won’t be as effective as specific keywords, so keep that in mind.


3. Writing catchy SEO titles for each page will help catch your target audience’s attention. Remember that infusing your site, content, and titles with SEO keywords is a wise business decision, but if you go overboard, it’s going to have the opposite effect on your visitors. Make sure your titles and content read as such; if they come across as just a way for you to have SEO throughout your site, no one’s going to read your content or learn about your products and services anyway.


4. Keep your content concise. Write small paragraphs that contain information relevant to each page. Make sure each page of content on your website is unique as well. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will see your website as redundant if you have the same copy on each page and it can affect your rankings.


5. Add bullet points or numbered list where you can. This will allow your visitors to skim your content for the information they’re looking for. Make sure you have a link to your contact form on every single page so they can easily reach you by email or phone.


6. Don’t forget about call to action. Your content needs to be persuasive—but not overly so. If your content is too sales-y, you may lose visitors. But if it’s filled with informative, engaging, and persuasive content that leads them to an action, then you’ve done it right.

See: Call to Action: Why Your Marketing Content Needs It

Once your content is up and running, you might also want to think about blogging about your products and services to help increase your visibility amongst search engines. Voice of North America lets you post blogs about any topic you want in a 50 domain network, getting you quality linkbacks from relevant content.