How to Write Content for a Website

It can be one of the biggest questions content writers face, how to write content for a website? Research shows that website content is often scanned rather than read. Only about 16% of users will read an entire online article, meaning four out of five readers aren’t actually reading at all; they’re just scanning.

Good website content must engage, inspire, inform and snag the interest of users within seconds. The steps below will help you to establish this effectively.

Research your audience

Essentially you are writing for human readers, so what you say and how you say it can depend on a variety of factors. Firstly, their level of expertise. If you are writing for an expert, your language is going to be different than if you are writing for a novice. Secondly, find out what your audience really wants to know. This is the core of effective website content writing; by knowing what your audience is interested in, you can determine what elements need adding to your content. Thirdly, knowing how the readers get to your page can guide how you write your content as well as how you position it on the website. Using an analytics program to monitor the statistics of your page is also a good way of looking for common traits among the visitors on your website.

Research your competitors

Having a well-rounded view of the competitive landscape will enable you to see what they are doing differently. Comparing your site guides you to important insights that will impact the website content you write, as your readers will also be reading your competitor’s content. Seeing what your competitors are writing will help you to identify industry trends in website content, along with finding new ideas for inspiration when writing content.

Planning your website content

The planning stage is essential. You will need to think about how your content will fit together on the website page. Website content comes in a variety of shapes and sizes; long-form, blog posts, sidebar blurbs, product descriptions, etc. Think about what pages you will need and the purpose of each as the different types of content will be suited for different purposes. Once you know the main goal of the website content you’re producing, you will be able to write website content that will be well received effectively.

Writing your website content

Start with an outline of what you want to write, gather ideas and resources together in order to start writing your website content. When you start writing it’s good to have a keyword or phrase in mind; your keyword will depend on what topic you are writing about as well as determining what kind of traffic you get. Having a keyword will enable you to tell a better story to both visitors and search engines. By communicating with search engines you can rank higher, which will then drive traffic onto your website.

Try to also think about the length of the content for your website, the topics you will be addressing and how you are presenting it all.

Adding visual content elements

To create strong pages, it’s not just text that you need to think about, you need to think about the multi-media aspects also! Including images, videos, charts, graphs, line breaks, etc. Multimedia will provide something else for your readers to interact with; interactive content will provide a secondary visual element for your readers. 90% of the information transmitted to the human brain is visual – people process visual information 60,00 times faster than text.

Putting effort into how you design your page and what content you incorporate will go a long way to increase your traffic.

Optimize your SEO

Using a keyword naturally throughout your content will help search engines to identify and rank your website. The keyword is a means to make your content valuable, readable and search-friendly. By using a keyword within your page title, subheadings, taglines and within image alt tags, this can help Google target your website page. Doing some SEO keyword research will tell you what topics google (and your target audience) find relevant.

Audiences will find website content through may different paths; social media, links from other websites, email sharing and search engine results. One important thing to remember is to keep your content fresh! Search engines love fresh content and so do your readers.