5 Ways Written Website Content Drives Online Success

Websites are complex beasts, but the trick to success is making them as simple as possible for your users to find and to use. Whilst there is a whole lot of web design wizardry that goes into building a great website, today we want to focus on written content. Those in the web design biz (no one calls it that, we just wanted to try it out. Our apologies; it won’t happen again), know that written content is crucial, especially for a new website. Who knew some well-placed words had the power to obliterate competition, win over website users, and inspire those all-important sales and enquiries? Well, we did, but we want you to know why too. As a web design agency, whether creating a website from scratch or revitalising a tired website, we will always hand over the content to our team of content writers – and there’s good reason for it.

Website with Easy Access Information

Remember that really boring History teacher? He was the one ready for retirement but never wanted to leave. He would deliver a dull, draining, and largely irrelevant lecture for an entire lesson and only touch upon the important stuff in the final five minutes. We probably slept at intervals, not that he’d notice.

Unfortunately in school, there wasn’t really the option of leaving the classroom when we weren’t learning what was needed. The same cannot be said for your website. Visitors can leave your website at any time with the click of a button, and they will if they don’t find what they’re looking for in the first few seconds. Not wishing to ramble on ourselves, let’s get to the point. Your website content must be informative, relevant, and tell your users exactly what they need to hear and what to do next from the moment they arrive in order to drive that online success.

Quality Content Excites Your Users

Whilst informative content is key, ensuring that the content is equally engaging is essential. That’s because words have a way of whipping your audience into action. Think about when you last read a really good book. A real page-turner, you were compelled to move onto the next chapter and then the next book once you had finished. Similarly, a great website needs to have captivating content that will grab and hold the attention of the users, leading them through the website’s pages and have them coming back for more. Investing their time on your website will likely turn into investing their money in your products or services – and of course, like any good book, recommending it to a friend.

Share Your Story, Build Trust, Project Your Brand

Technology is a wonderful thing. However, with so much online interaction, we have been starved somewhat of human communication. Content marketing and writing often focuses on creating a human voice or team of voices, from somewhere behind the screen. Of course, the tone and style of voice is sector-dependent, and a skilled content writer will be able to craft the perfect voice for your business.

A recent trend in web design is storytelling. This doesn’t mean tales of dragons and castles and the like, but sharing the story of your business, rather than projecting a soulless website. Engaging, empathetic, and original, your website content should enable you to build a relationship with your audience, project your brand message, and inspire conversions from user to consumer.

SEO, Of Course

How could we end without mentioning our good friend, SEO?

A website and its written content can be comedy gold, draw tears from heartless souls, have the quality of prize-winning literature, but unless it can be found in the highest ranks of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you won’t see much traffic driven to your website and your opportunities for online success are somewhat shot-at.

When writing content that is optimised for the search engines it incorporates a lot of what we have already talked about in this blog. In particular, written content should be focused, relevant, and well-structured (no chunky paragraphs, please). A professional content writer should have a firm understanding of SEO and much of their writing will involve keyword inclusion. The trick is in picking relevant keywords for a particular page and writing them into the content without feeling overdone – otherwise your users won’t like it and neither will Google.

New Content – Blogging

Make no mistake, blogging isn’t something reserved for Millennials, nor is content writing limited to the point at which your website is created. There are lots of great things about having a blog on your website, but not wanting to waffle on like your history teacher, we will stick to five key points:

1. Blogs are a fantastic way to get new, relevant information onto your website, which is great for SEO – and your audience

2. Blogs are another way to share your brand message and solidify your voice

3. Blogs can be easily shared across social media and help to boost the traffic to your website

4. Blogs provide a really good internal linking opportunity where you can link from the article back to other website pages such as services, products, and other articles - Google likes this

5. With great blog content, people are willing to share it – shared content earns links, and links back to your website are worth their weight in gold when it comes to SEO

It isn’t cool anymore to be the quiet and mysterious type; a social website makes for a successful website and staying current and connected to your audience is really important.

When writing content for your own website, you can get caught up in your own expertise. As a web design agency with a (really great, awesome, creative, cool, talented…) content team, we can take your knowledge and spin it into some exciting, informative and fully optimised content. Whether you have an existing website in need of a write-over, or you are looking to have a brand new business website, get in touch with the team at Christian Michaels today for a free consultation.

#blogging #websitedesign #contentmarketing