Are you a content writer? How many websites do you visit every day? Most probably 10 to 15 sites. While visiting from one website to another, you can find good and bad content on their website. How much time do you spend reading bad content? Not even a second right. When you find a bad content on a particular website, you will never visit that website again in the future.
Now, think according to visitor’s perspective. A visitor clings to the website when they discover great and valuable content.
Content is king!!! Google suggests creating valuable content over and over. Creating valuable content initially and check duplicate content using plagiarism checking tools. Great content is used to drive engagement of the visitors. If you’re not attracting visitors, your job as a content marketer has not been accomplished.
What is the content?
As per website marketing terminology, content can be of any type,material that can be viewed, read, watch and hear.
Popular types of content used by every business are:
- Blogpost
- Articles
- Website copy
- Guestpost
- Video
- Podcasts
The best part is you can download the media files as well. It can be accessible and downloaded to your desktop or laptop.
If you’re looking for the best ways to attract visitors, then have a look below
Know your goals and objectives
The initial step while setting a goal is to analyse and understand your visitors. Creating content without knowing about your audiences can lead you to failure. Therefore be specific as possible while setting a goal. If you set a long term goal, then break it into different chunks and work effectively on every chunk.
Having clear, well-defined goals can:
- Help your organization grow
- Achieve your core objectives
- Enhance teamwork
- Improve your traffic and conversions
Research
You’ve turned on your laptop and opened a new word document. Now you’re ready to write the article of the day. You head on for the topic. You’re clueless and didn’t understand the topic. Now you’re in a dilemma, how to start and write. Don’t panic!!! That situation happens with every content writer.
Spend your time on research. Yes, you need to check trustworthy websites to understand and get clear information about that topic. Write the content with confidence.
- Use advanced search, check your competitor’s websites and blogs.
- Don’t consider the websites that have mistakes.
- Search for latest and breaking stories.
- Keep an eye on new articles
Call-to-action
Want to drive more conversions? Looking for new visitors? You can’t get them without implementing perfect call-to-action.
A call-to-action is a fancy term across the marketing world. Businesses use “subscribe” CTA to gain new visitors and “buy now” CTA to drive conversions. CTA button or phrases can perform various actions depending upon the goal.
If you’re running a campaign then you need to have a well-crafted call-to-action button to drive particular action. You can create short and long CTAs as per your requirement.
Put important information first
Creating content for the website acts differently from creating content for a blog. While writing a blog, you follow a rule – introduction, types, examples and at the end conclusion. You focus more on the conclusion at the end of the blog.
Considering website content it works in the opposite direction. Always posts the important information at the beginning.
Example: You want to buy an iPhone. Whenever you visit a website, you want it to be a mobile-selling website. Also, you need a search option, to check whether the iPhone is available or not.
Therefore you should keep important information at the beginning of the webpage to improve conversion rate.
Write great headlines
Whether you’re creating a resume or addressing your potential customers, well-designed and well-framed headline can make your content more inviting and readable. Headlines play a major role in every document. Headlines are what immediately pops out and captures the reader’s eye.
It’s important to create effective content. On the other hand, it’s also important to get content read and ranked on search engines – which is where great headlines come into the picture.
Keep your headlines short and concise. Focus on writing the headline below 70 characters. Avoid truncating issues by maintaining a character limit.
Use bullet points
Do you like to read lengthy content? Of course no.
What could you do if you have lengthy content? Break down and categorize every piece of content. By using bullet points make your content interesting and readable.
Want to write effective bullet points and numbered list? Have a look below
- Think bullet points as a mini headline
- Highlight every category
- Keep it simple and understandable
- Arrange your points in a symmetrical manner
- Add keywords to impress search engines
Never ever mix and match the structure of the sentence. Make sure your bullet points are consistent. Start every point with a similar part of speech. Example, if you begin with an adverb, begin all the points with an adverbs.
SEO content, the human touch
Content and search engine optimization. These two fancy words are ruling marketing world from decades. Whether you’re running a small or large entrepreneur you concentre on these two areas. Implementing SEO techniques and creating great content can drive maximum visitors and conversions.
Also, you need to write content for humans, not for robots or search engines. Create content to educate your visitors not for lead or sale. You should make readers need to refer your website and talk to share your content with their friends.
Optimize your content
Optimizing content is simple and important. Without optimizing the content you can’t rank your website in search engines. Optimizing content while creating can ensure that your content is “audience-centric”.
Many content marketers believe optimizing content is just writing quality content. If you’re one among them, you’re going on a wrong path. Optimizing content needs SEO best practices and keywords. Also, there are additional important factors are included to influence in optimizing great content.
Start optimizing content from meta title and meta description. Include a relevant internal and external link for additional information.
Organize every paragraph
A paragraph is a building block. Many marketers describe paragraph in terms of size. Writing content in a paragraph format can be a simple task.
Start writing a paragraph with your topic. Include supporting sentences to expand and express your views on the topic. Finally, end paragraph with a conclusion.
There are numerous ways to organize your paragraph.
- Narration: Narrate a story. It’s a better way to go chronologically.
- Description: If you’re selling electronic products, explain every product features and specifications.
- Process: Explain how an electronic product works in a step-by-step procedure.
- Classification: Categorize content into specific groups.
- Illustrations: Consider a few examples and explain the concept in-depth.
Write for scanners
Do you read every content on the web page? Hardly any. Whenever you visit a new web page, you probably give a glance. You scan information at the top and click on the link that catches your interest.
As per the analysis, 16% of visitors read content on web pages from verbatim. Other visitors just scan the web page. Your visitor is looking for information. Ensure they can easily understand the information available on your website.
Use care words
Consider you need to book a flight ticket to Canada at the cheapest price possible. What would you search for? A cost-effective flight, a cheap-fare flight or a budget-friendly flight to Canada.
Will you search for cost-effective flight? Absolutely no. Everybody prefers for cheap-fare flight. These are considered as care words. These are the words everybody are looking for. Care words make your content sounds better and effective.
Improve readability
How can you improve readability? While posting an article in WordPress, you can find an option called “readability”. It ensures the readability of your content – Good, ok and needs improvement.
When your readability mode indicates ok or needs improvement, it’s time to make a few changes.
Tips to improve readability
- Always use short and clear paragraph, use a maximum of four to five sentence.
- Avoid using unnecessary words
- Use active tense
- Keep your text short
- Use more transition words
- Address your visitor on a second person basis
Also, differentiate your content by providing heading such as H1, H2 and H3.
Expect visitor to arrive anytime and anywhere
Some people read novel in order i.e., chapter 1,2,3, etc, but there are people who skip chapters too. Many website visitors will never start reading from the home page. They can arrive randomly on any web page.
Therefore you need to create amazing content on every web page.
- Every web page must be easy and convenient for a visitor to scan.
- Your visitor should understand “who are you” and “what you offer”.
- Every web page must have a call-to-action button. These buttons will tell visitors where and what to do next.
Make it simple for hunters to spot you
Customers always hunt for great information or products. If you’re a newbie, getting into your customer’s line of sight can be a daunting task. Apart from creating great content, you need to implement SEO strategies as well.
If you want your customers to find you?
Attract potential customers or visitors to your web page by contributing valuable and related information. On the other hand
- Give an answer to every customer’s question
- Consider one specific topic for each web page
- Include internal link and external links to relevant pages
- Use phrases and care words your customers are looking for
Give a visual touch
Web content and web design must work hand-in-hand.
The visual appearance of your web page will have an impact on the readability of your content. It’s a known fact “brain comprehend visuals faster than a plain text”.
Earlier days, a website can rank with text alone. But if you think you can get success with these old strategies today, then you’re wrong.
Words are not sufficient today. You need a special touch for your content i.e visuals. It’s no doubt that media files have amazing lifespan online. Whenever you create content, don’t forget to include visual media files. It includes images, video, gif, audio, infographics etc. By implementing this strategy can increase engagement on your web pages.
Focus on a single purpose
Being focused is important to set clear goals and objectives. When you’re running a website you have a different set of goals. If you want a quality output, you need to implement wisely one after the other goals. You can’t focus on all your purposes at the same time.
Choose a module and work on it completely. As soon as your activity gets finished focus on another module. Consider, you need to write content for about us, home page and product page. Start from the home page and then focus on about us. When you finish with two pages, concentrate on the product page.
Create curated content
Creating curated content can be a difficult task for many content marketers. How do you create great content? You need to list out epic posts.
Writing an epic post needs time and dedication. If you’re running a small business, you need to focus on other business activities. It includes customer support, developing, testing, improvement, marketing and others. But if you want to rank top on search engines, then you need to create curated content.
- Creating original content is more beneficial
- Curated content ranks better on search engines
- Expand your niche of expertise
Create a unique tone
When you create content for web page or blog, aim for unique tone throughout your website. Because people don’t show interest in copied or duplicate content or ideas. Make sure your website tone, look and feel positive. While designing a web page maintain unique colour, font and background. It can resemble your brand in front of the audience. Creating a unique tone can help to build a connection with the audience.
Use plagiarism checking tools
Whether you’re writing a personal or company blog, checking the uniqueness of written content is an essential process. Especially when you’re writing for web page, it’s important to ensure the published content is unique to avoid SEO penalty. There are few plagiarisms checking tools such as Copyscape, Grammarly, Quetext and Plagramme. These tools help a content marketer to check whether your content is unique or copies.
Edit. Edit. Edit
Completed creating content for your web page? Hurray!!! You’ve done a great job. You spend weeks and month for creating unique content. But, the question – How much time you’re spending on editing and proofreading the content? Zero, right? If you want to provide compelling content then concentrate on editing and proofreading.
Review your entire content. Observe every piece of information clearly from top to bottom. Look for errors and missing details on your content. Whenever you find an error, make a note and rectify it immediately. If you don’t find errors on your content, then read it louder.