What is Website Content?
Website content consists of everything displayed on your web pages. This includes text, images, videos, and audio in various styles or formats.
What makes a website good? And why does it matter?
One important reason is that 75% of consumers judge a company’s trustworthiness based on its website design, according to Sweor. Website design is essentially the way content is arranged and presented.
How you put together your website elements to create a strong impact depends on your objectives and audience. Each part of a website has its own rules and needs a specific type of content. We will explore this further in the next sections.
Additionally, you can’t ignore technical aspects when thinking about website content. A website must be easy to use to keep visitors engaged. If there are too many images or videos that slow down the page, it might drive people away.
All these factors should be taken into account when developing your website content. Keep in mind that a web page is not just one project; it consists of various sections, each requiring a different strategy. If you run a business, your website content should also align with your overall content management plan.
Types of webpage content
Here’s a summary of the different types of written content commonly found on a website:
- Marketing page content. This includes your homepage, About page, and landing pages. These pages share information about your brand with current and potential customers. They often feature multimedia elements like images, illustrations, graphics, or videos.
- Product or service page content. This type of content highlights the benefits of specific products or services. It may include answers to customer questions and encourages purchases through reviews. Product pages usually have a call to action (CTA), like an Add to Cart button.
- Blog posts. Blog content consists of long-form articles that provide valuable information to your target audience. Unlike marketing pages, blog posts are not always focused on your company. They often play a role in a company’s SEO and content marketing strategy by educating or entertaining readers and using specific keywords to improve search engine visibility.
- User-generated content. Some businesses feature user-generated content, such as testimonials or reviews, on their websites. This type of content helps encourage purchases by providing social proof, where people are influenced to act based on the actions of others.
- Case studies. B2B companies often create case studies to demonstrate how their products or services work with specific customers. These studies focus on a customer relationship and illustrate how the product or service helped the customer solve an issue or achieve a goal.
- Downloadable content. Some businesses offer long-form materials, like ebooks and whitepapers, for download in exchange for contact details. This practice, known as gating content, is common in B2B but can also work for B2C ecommerce if the content provides unique value. For instance, a boutique tonic water and ginger beer brand might provide a downloadable mixology guide with recipes that feature their products.
- Help center content. Help center content addresses common questions and assists customers in resolving issues. It can boost customer satisfaction and lessen the workload on customer service teams. For example, if customers often have trouble finding the On button for a product, adding instructions to the FAQ section can help reduce frustration and the number of support inquiries.
How to write good website content: 5 tips
– Identify your audience
– Create a brand style guide
– Develop an editorial process
– Leverage intros and conclusions
– Optimize for SEO
1. Identify your audience
Writing for a specific group is easier than trying to appeal to everyone. To address this, many business owners create buyer personas, which are fictional characters that represent their ideal customers.
For instance, A boutique coffee shop creates “Sophia the Coffee Aficionado”:
– Age: 28, Job: Marketing Manager, Lifestyle: Busy urban professional.
Interests: Premium coffee, sustainability, social media.
– Needs: Quick, high-quality coffee for her morning routine.
– The shop tailors its efforts to Sophia by offering online ordering, promoting eco-friendly practices, and showcasing premium blends on social media.
2. Create a brand style guide
Many companies develop brand style guides for their written materials. These guides outline essential information for creating content that aligns with your brand. For example, you might include details about your target audience, stress the use of active voice, define the brand’s tone, and clarify editorial choices like the use of the Oxford comma, abbreviations, and number formatting.
Having a style guide helps ensure consistency across all content and makes it easier to assign writing tasks to team members.
3. Develop an editorial process
Content creation involves several steps and often includes multiple team members. You will brainstorm ideas, outline your content, draft it, review and revise, and finally proofread before publishing. You can
Following a structured content writing process can streamline your workflow, reduce errors in the final product, and provide clarity for external writers or team members involved. It also helps maintain consistency by ensuring that content from different writers adheres to the same standards.
4. Leverage intros and conclusions
Content must grab the audience’s attention immediately. This means the introduction should be quick and interesting. You need to avoid long intros and phrases. Instead, start marketing and product pages with a concise headline that sums up the product’s value, such as “Your skin care problems solved” or “No pores, no problem.”
Experts in web content writing also focus on conclusions, thinking about what action they want readers to take after engaging with the content. Often, web content ends with a call to action (CTA), like “Learn More” or “Contact Us” for marketing pages, “Add to Cart” for product pages, or links to other resources for blogs and articles.
5. Optimize for SEO
Making your content SEO-friendly and promote content seeding can help your website rank higher in search results, making it easier for your target audience to find you through search engines.
Utilize your buyer personas and audience research to find and use relevant keywords, but don’t prioritize search engines over actual readers. Overusing keywords, known as keyword stuffing, can make your content less clear and valuable, hurting your SEO. Aim for a keyword density of about 1% to 2%—for a 200-word article, that means using your target keyword two to four times. Using it excessively, like 30 times, can annoy readers and lead search engines to lower your ranking.