Content is more than just words on a page. Content is what engages your visitors with a brand and helps them convert or choose your services over a competitor. Using the right set of words for your customers is a key part of the conversion process.
Creating consistent, engaging, and high-quality content will impact your audience more than any other technique. Why is consistency in content important? It is important for customers to connect with your brand messaging and being consistent will be an important part of the growth and success of your business.
Content is also important for the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, et all). Over the years, content writing has shifted; we see it all the time when visiting a website and the content is not written for a human, but rather for a bot from Google that is riddled with unnecessary keywords. Do websites with this old mentality rank? Yes, a few do slip through, but Google has a way of eventually catching up with anyone. Our policy is to write for humans, the thing that most people do not talk about is the bounce rates of the websites that are written for bots. When content is not written for human visitors, visitors tend to leave on a rather high basis. This sends signals to the search engines when someone clicks the dreaded back button and goes back to the search results page after a few seconds. That tells the bots (after many repeated occurrences of this) that the website in question is not serving up the content that visitors are looking for. This impacts the rankings of a website.
Did you know that you may be writing for more than one audience? Think about it this way, you have a successful fishing charter. You want to attract new customers but also encourage repeat business. Your primary audience may be existing clients. Your secondary audience would be much broader to include new customers that are ready to book today, people that are price shopping you against competitors, and those that may be looking to book out in the future without a commitment today. You need to make sure that your content is accessible and interesting to all sets of audiences. You should be sure to ask yourself, what kinds of questions would your customers or prospects be looking to have answered or what topics would they be interested in reading about or seeing in picture form? It is also important to think about what search terms they may type into Google to find your website? Then plan to use those terms in headlines and sub-headers.
The attention span of readers is not long, and you will want to engage readers with easy to digest content. We understand that there are highly technical terms for any business, but using them sparingly will be in your best interest.
The best new stories are organized with the inverted pyramid model in which information is presented in descending order of importance. This will allow your audience to read the most crucial details first to decide if they want to continue reading. This model is used in emails as well to eliminate distractions.
In addition to putting the most important information at the top, making sure that your text is easily skimmed is also important. Most readers will scan the page to see if the information they are looking for is easily found; more often than not, if they do not find it, they will move on. How do you do this? Instead of long paragraphs, be sure to include bulleted lists and white space so that your content can breathe.
Did you know that nearly all of the information that is transmitted to the brain is visual? People also process visual information so much faster than text. An easy-to-read chart or infographic may be the best visual content that you can serve up to your customers. Images also help to break up the text, making your page easier to read.
The best websites have calls to action (CTA) or buttons to click on to request more information or download supplemental content. These calls to action can direct readers to other parts of your website or encourage them to share your content with friends, family, or colleagues. Action verbs are key within CTA’s. Some great examples are download, sign up, learn more, share, join, etc.
Writing content can be one of the most dreaded tasks for any business owner. It is hard work, but it can be so rewarding to go from a website with a high bounce rate that barely converts to one that has a steady flow of leads coming through on a regular basis. This is where Hoss Digital can come in to help you. We have been writing content that converts for over ten years. Contact us today to talk about your website’s content and what the team can do to optimize for your customers and prospects.
Hoss Digital offers a full suite of digital marketing services to compliment your website, grow your brand, and amplify your lead generation process.
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