How to Develop Fantastic Website Content

Any business that wants to remain relevant in today’s business environment knows that a professionally-designed website is indispensable. It’s what makes it possible to carve out space for yourself in an increasingly digital world. But just having a website isn’t enough; you need content that is just as awesome as you are. So how do you go about creating fantastic content for your website?

Before we explain how to make great content, we first have to start with why websites need great content. After all, time is money, so it’s critical to spend your time and money effectively. Why should you invest time and money into the content on your website? The simple answer is because it’s a valuable investment that will boost your search engine optimization (SEO), improve your content marketing, and increase the number of positive brand interactions your business gets.

The whole point of having a website is to make your company visible to users. The higher your website ranks on search engines like Google and Bing, the more visible your business is and the more web traffic you’re likely to get as a result. Search engines use keywords to decide how relevant your pages are to different search entries. Website content provides a natural way for you to include keywords on your website. Therefore, having quality content with appropriate keywords will boost your google rankings by making your site more relevant to various search entries.

Words and media are your tools when it comes to marketing your business and its products. Website content is one of the best mediums you can use to show your customers the value of what you are offering and how you can solve their problems. That’s far from the only way your web content is valuable, though. Web content is the foundation of content marketing, which can help you establish your business as an authority in your field. As a bonus, the more relevance and authority you have, the higher you’ll rank on search engines.

At least some of the consumers who visit your website are doing so because they’re looking for information. The content you have on your website is a crucial part of defining the experience they have when interacting with your brand. Your content (whether it’s written, visual, or auditory) helps set the tone of your website and portrays the personality of your brand. Make no mistake, your branding matters to consumers. Many will choose to support a business or not based on how well they identify with its brand. You can use your content to help solidify your branding and make it stand out.

Having quality web content is clearly important, but how do you go about creating it? Start by defining your audience. Knowing your audience is crucial whenever you’re presenting information, whether written or spoken. Your audience should guide your word choice, how technical you get, the voice you use, your perspectives on topics, and even the topics themselves. To begin identifying your audience, start with target demographics but don’t end there; get as detailed and specific as possible. Once you have your audience selected, research them. Look for information about their likes and dislikes, wants and needs, aspirations and dreams, their hobbies, and more.

What are the problems that your audience needs to solve? Thorough research should answer this fundamental question. Remember, consumers tend to buy solutions, not products. You can use that information when creating marketing materials and when drafting content for your product pages. Beyond that, you can use it to help generate a list of topics that consumers may find useful or interesting. When you provide valuable content to your site visitors, they’ll start to associate your business with solutions, which means they’ll be more likely to turn to you when they need the products you offer.

You aren’t the only business trying to attract customers, though. If you want to stay ahead of competitors, you need to keep tabs on what they’re doing with their websites. Of course, ideally, you want your website to offer better content and perform better than the competition. Try to establish a baseline of how your top competitors rank and how well their websites are doing. Research what keywords they rank for, the depth and quality of their content, and what their web traffic is like. You may find that studying your competitors will help you generate some new ideas for content on your own web pages. That being said, avoid copying them. Plagiarism is terrible for your reputation and for your SEO.

The keywords you use play a central role in how search engine crawlers will index your site. They serve as indicators that tell the search engine what searches your pages are likely to be relevant to. In order for your website to be effective at using keywords, you’ll need to do some research first. Think about what words consumers would type into a search bar if they were to look for your business. Those words they type in are the keywords you should be using on those pages. Do some digging to see what websites are already ranking for those keywords and compare them to your page. You may find that you need to use more niche or “long tail” keywords to get the type of search results you’re looking for. Integrate keywords naturally into your titles, headings, metadata, and content, but avoid keyword stuffing.

When creating content, it helps to have a general idea of what topics to address and how they relate to one another. Creating a map of your topics can give you a visual representation of how they are interconnected. It can also help you plan content for every page of your website. Don’t worry about making every topic you have listed relate to everything else, though. It’s okay for some topics to be tangential as long as they can relate back to the core theme of your website. For example, you might branch out into topics that relate to your industry as a whole rather than your business specifically. Doing this can serve to build your authority and increase the amount of web traffic you earn. You and your team likely have some unique expertise that you can leverage when creating content. Use that to your advantage.

Once you have selected the general topics you want your content to talk about, it’s time to start narrowing the focus. Go through each of the brainstormed topics and start drilling down. For each topic, list and define specific items to talk about. These will become your topic clusters.

While brainstorming, take into account the purpose of each piece of content. Is a particular piece of content meant to be a concise product description, an industry blog article, a list of helpful how-to instructions, or perhaps a detailed description of your services? The purpose of the content should inform the way the content is written, so having a clear vision for that is crucial. Form follows function, as they say.

Relevance is another important component of having a quality website. You can do plenty of things to boost your relevance, but one of the simpler steps is to create a content schedule. Search engines want the sites they show to searchers to be relevant and current. Regularly updating your site by adding new content can help with that. How you structure your content schedule is up to you, but generally speaking, it’s a good idea to add content on a weekly basis. If that’s too frequent, try to add at least a couple of new pieces of content every month. Whatever you decide, be consistent with it.

The difference that a good writer and editor can make for your content may surprise you. Writing and editing isn’t an area that you want to skimp on. A good writer and editor can elevate the technical quality of your content. Think about it for a minute. Would you trust a website with poorly worded or confusing copy that is full of spelling and grammatical errors? Those are the hallmarks of scam pages, and it leaves a bad impression on consumers. A good writer can craft compelling content that encourages site visitors to continue along the customer journey. A quality editor refines the content so it is polished, purposed, and ready to post.

For your content to serve you best, it should be optimized for search engines. Remember to use keywords naturally throughout, aiming for a 1-2% density in relation to the rest of the text. Include keywords in the title, at least one of the headings, the meta description, the title tag, and the image alt tags. In the page copy, you can add internal links to some of your other relevant web pages. Also, remember to optimize the design of your web content for mobile traffic. A website design and development agency should be able to help you with this if you’re not sure how to do it yourself.

Don’t be stingy about sharing your content on social media. When used properly, social media can be a valuable tool for boosting your web traffic and online visibility. As you add new content to your site, share it on the social media platforms your customers use most frequently. Remember to take into account the type of posts that work best for any given platform. Include a link back to the original content on your site so viewers can navigate to your website easily if they want to.

The content on your website can be one of the most powerful tools available to your business. It can help you boost your visibility and search engine ranking, promote your brand, and even sell your products. The better your website content, the better off you’ll be. Take the time to revamp your existing content and expand it regularly so you can take advantage of all the benefits that great content can offer you.