How To Write Content For A Website: Top Tips

Does your website content feel like a chore instead of a conversation? Or does your content no longer mirror your brand values or business goals? We’ll take you through ow to write content for a website, including helpful tips and insights that you can put into practice.

When it comes to your website, first impressions matter. This means the content on your website can significantly impact your website’s performance. When executed right, website content can: drive traffic, build trust and drive meaningful conversions for your business.

There’s no cookie-cutter approach to writing website content, but we’ve put together some tips and best practices that you can use to help you write rich, compelling and SEO-friendly content for your website.

What To Do Before You Start Writing Content For A Website

Before you even start planning your content, you need to understand the people who will be reading this content – your key audience. Defining your audience prior to planning your content will help guide your content strategy, ensuring your tailoring your content towards the people who will be landing on your website.

Similar to how you might define target audiences in your business already, you can follow the same exercises when it comes to defining your audiences for your website content. For instance, you can consider:

• Creating buyer personas
• Analyse your website analytics
• Conduct customer surveys or focus groups

When you’re defining your audience for your content, you can also consider the following factors.

Key Demographics, Interests and Needs

Understanding your key demographics help you to tailor your messaging to resonate with your audience effectively. There are different factors that can affect this such as ages, locations, job roles and many more elements. For example, fashion brands that are targeting younger demographics will adopt a different content strategy compared to a fashion brand that is targeting older demographics.

Your demographics also help you to identify their key interests and needs. These elements will guide the tone of voice that you should use when writing your website content. This will help your content appeal to your target audience and begin to build trust, relatability and credibility.

Pain Points and Challenges

When users land on your website, it’s more than likely because you are offering something that they need. Ultimately, you’re providing a solution to a pain point that they have. This could be a product, service or simply information that you can provide to help them solve or answer the pain point they have.

Although your pain points might be obvious, it’s crucial that you communicate how you solve these for your target audience. When you’re planning and writing your website content, keep asking yourself if this is solving the problem for your customer.

When you’re defining your audiences, identify the main pain points that your business solves and thread this through your website content.

If users who land on your site can’t find the answers to their pain points, or find it difficult to locate this information on your site, they’ll leave your site and look somewhere else.

How To Plan Writing Content For Your Website

Now that you have defined your key audiences who will be reading your website content, you can start crafting your content strategy. Your strategy might be straight-forward, or multi-layered, but the most important factor is that it’s tailored for your business goals and SEO.

Mapping Your Website Content

Mapping your website will help you break down where different pieces of content are needed for each part of the website. This ensures you provide information clearly and efficiently for whoever might be viewing certain pages on your site.

For the main pages on the site, start with planning content for each stage of the customer journey. We recommend putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and going through your website like a potential customer might and ask yourself:

• Are you providing the most relevant information?
• Is the information clear and easy to digest?
• Is it clear what you want the user to do on the site? (i.e. purchase a product, make a booking, call the business).

These questions can help you identify where different pieces of content are needed to help the customer along in their journey. It also helps avoid high bounce rates, which can occur when users land on your site, but are not able to find the information they’re searching for.

If you’re also planning on writing blog posts, we recommend creating a content calendar. This will help you strategies the topics you want to cover and provide more credible content for your website.

How Your Website Structure Impacts How You Write Your Content

A well-defined website structure is more than just a visual layout; it’s a strategic framework that guides users and search engines through your content.

Depending on the nature of your business, your website might follow a certain structure that aligns with the product/service you’re offering. We’ll go through a few common structural elements and a couple of crucial structural elements to consider when it comes to writing your website content.

Logical Hierarchy

Imagine your website as a tree. The homepage is the trunk, and the branches are your main categories. Subcategories and individual pages extend from these branches. This hierarchical structure creates a clear path for users and search engines to follow.
Regardless of what your business is offering, keep this logical hierarchy when structuring your website and planning your website content.

Siloing

Siloing involves organising related content into distinct sections or “silos.” This helps establish topical relevance and improves search engine understanding of your website’s focus.

For example, a photography website might have silos for “landscape photography,” “portrait photography,” and “wedding photography.”
Siloing helps users navigate your website smoothly, as well as making your information easier to locate and digest. This is also more crucial if your website contains multiple services, offerings or products, as they can benefit from their own “silos” that the user can quickly go to to find what they need.

Refining Your URL Structure

A clear website structure should be reflected in your URL structure. Use descriptive and keyword-rich URLs that accurately represent the content of each page. For example, www.example.com/services/web-design is more informative than www.example.com/page123.
Having a clear URL structure improves UX as they can see a clear path through your website to where they are now. Then, if they want to go back to a previous page, they can understand more clearly where to go via the URL.

A clear URL structure is also helpful for SEO, as it makes it easier for crawlers to understand the website’s organisation and content. Also, including relevant keywords in the URL can help boost search engine rankings.

Optimising Content For A Mobile Experience

A good website structure is vital for mobile responsiveness. Mobile users need a clear and easy to understand website even on small screens. When you’re planning your website structure, it’s useful to also see how a mobile user would experience the website.
It’s becoming increasingly common for users to start their journey on their mobile, especially during the research stages. Therefore, if your website structure isn’t optimised for mobile users, you could risk losing potential customers at the first stage of their journey.

Writing SEO-Friendly Website Content

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation ) is about maximising your website’s visibility in organic search results (results that appear in the search results that are not sponsored ad placements). It’s a continuous process that requires understanding both search engine algorithms and user behaviour.

SEO uses a ranking system to help marketers and content writers understand how well their website is performing for organic searches. These ranks come from search engines like Google, which uses complex algorithms to determine the relevance and quality of web pages. These algorithms consider numerous factors, including keywords, backlinks, user experience, and website structure.

Conduct Keyword Research

To help write SEO-friendly content, conduct keyword research. Keywords are words and phrases that people type into the search engine to generate results.

Think of keywords like the bridge between what users are searching for and the content you provide. When you’re conducting keyword research, consider these three factors:

1. Relevance: Use keywords that are directly related to your content and target audience.
2. Natural Integration: Incorporate keywords naturally into your content, avoiding keyword stuffing (overuse of keywords).
3. Placement: Place keywords strategically in key areas, such as page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and body text.

Use Internal and External Linking

Internal linking involves linking one page to another page on the same website, which provides a wealth of benefits for SEO. Not only does it improve user navigation, it also helps to share your link equity, also known as “link juice.” Link juice is the value passed from one page to another through links. Internal links help distribute this value throughout your website, improving the overall authority of your pages.

Search engine crawlers use internal links to discover and index new pages on your website. A well-structured internal linking strategy ensures that all your important pages are easily accessible to crawlers.

External linking is linking pages from one website to another website, helping to improve SEO through building trust, credibility and authority. When you’re linking externally to another website, the more reputable that these websites are, the more trustworthy your content will be.

Also, by linking to authoritative sources, you signal to search engines that your website is also a credible source of information. Another way of boosting your SEO and your website’s authority.

SEO is a key when planning website content. Next, we’re exploring how to write content that encourages people to take action.

How To Write Compelling Content for a Website

Writing website content is a two-fold strategy between SEO and rich content. Now that we have looked at how to build SEO into your content strategy, we’ll now dive into how to write rich, compelling and engaging content.

Well-written content works in tandem with your website structure and SEO strategy to provide a smooth, enticing and enjoyable user experience. It can provide a memorable experience, leading to returning users and repeat customers. Rich content contributes to helping your SEO by building trust and credibility with your target audience.

We’ve put together our top tips for writing compelling content to help drive traffic, enhance UX and drive action.

Keep Your Language Clear and Concise

Although the writer of the content might be an expert in what they’re writing about, the person reading the content won’t be. In fact, they’re probably on your website because they require your knowledge and expertise.

Although it’s tempting to use highly technical language to enhance your expertise, this can be polarising for the reader. Your content should avoid jargon like this and communicate your expertise clearly to people who are not experts. Not only does this enhance the readability of your content, you’re building trust with the reader by making your knowledge more accessible.

Create Connections Through Your Content

The most powerful pieces of website content tell stories to create emotional connections with the reader. There are many ways that websites do this through their content, but the most important factor is that you remain authentic.

Just like when you’re talking to someone in person, readers can tell when you’re not being authentic in your writing. For brands, communicating your authenticity reinforces trust, loyalty and a strong customer base. It also helps attract new customers, as you can stand out amongst the crowd of faceless businesses, just through well-written content.

If you’re struggling to think of how to craft a compelling story for your website content, re-visit your key audiences and ask yourself: what kind of story would our target audience want to hear? Different audiences will resonate with different stories depending on their values, interests and pain points. Therefore weaving these elements into a rich, well-written piece of content can forge connections, build trust and improve the UX on your website.

Strategically Place Clear CTA’s

CTA’s (Calls To Action) are clear placements that instruct the user to take a form of action on your website. If you’re running an ecommerce site, you might have CTA’s to “Shop Now” or “Add to Basket.” If you’re looking to acquire leads, you might have CTA’s to “Get In Touch” that takes the user to a form, or “Book A Call” that takes them to an online calendar.

Regardless of the kind of CTA you include, having clear and strategically-placed CTA’s throughout your website content is crucial to drive action on your website. Writing website content without CTA’s is like giving someone a map with a start position, but not giving them the final destination they need to get to.

Top Tip: If you’re not sure whether you’re lacking CTA’s, go through your website like you’re a customer and see if you can get from your home page, to the ideal action without getting lost. You can also get other people to do this exercise to simulate how a real-life potential customer navigates through your website.

The Ongoing Process Of Writing Website Content

Once you’ve written your content, it’s important to get into the habit of reviewing your content on a regular basis. This ensures that your content is still showing the most relevant and up-to-date information, reinforcing trust and maintaining a strong SEO presence.

You also want to make sure that your website content aligns with what you’re communicating on your other marketing channels, such as social media and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns. Your customers will interact with your brand on various platforms outside of your website, therefore, regularly reviewing your website content will guide you in maintaining a strong brand presence and clear messaging.

Customer feedback can play an important role when reviewing your website content. If the reviews show gaps in communication, knowledge or a clunky UX, it’s most likely a sign that you need to review your content.

Top Tip: find people to review your website content that are not involved in the business. This will help you to identify knowledge gaps, navigation errors or other content elements that might need improving.

How To Write Content For A Website: Top Tips

Writing content for a website is a crucial and ongoing process that can drive traffic, build trust and generate conversions for your business.

In this blog post, we’ve identified a few key factors to consider when writing your content, including what to do before you even start writing! Identifying key audiences will help guide you when you’re planning your content and define a clear strategy.

When it comes to writing website content, your SEO strategy will play a crucial role. SEO is a complex, yet highly underrated element of content marketing that can help build credibility for your website and brand through rich, informative and compelling content.

As well as writing with SEO in mind, you can’t forget about writing for your target audience. Identifying what they are looking for on your website, helping them to get the information they need efficiently, and crafting a smooth UX, all assist in building trust and drive key results for your business.

Finally, you think your job might be done when you write the final word, but website content is an ongoing process. Getting into the habit of reviewing your website content on a regular basis will ensure you’re displaying accurate information, rich content and maintain rankings with your SEO.

Not sure where to start with writing your website content? Book in a chat with our team today to see how we can help.