Content is King – How To Write Good Content For Your Website

If you are reading this, you probably got stuck while writing content for your website.
If writing is not something that comes easy and effortless to you, but you still need to come up with something, this post should put you on the right track.

Regardless of the look and feel of a website, content is still king. Thanks to a good content, your website will be indexed by search engines higher and your customers will be able to find you quicker. They will also stay longer on your website and get more engaged. A good content is what makes a difference between gaining and losing a potential customer.

While design and development should be outsourced to professionals, the initial content should be written by you. In the early stages at least. Who else knows your business and your customers better than you? If you do something everyday for several years it’s likely that you have a lot to say about it. The biggest challenge is to tell your story in a way that is interesting to average Joe (aka your customer). Below you’ll find five simple tricks that will help you create good and valuable content for your website.

Know Your Audience

Knowing who your customers are should be fairly obvious. Unfortunately and surprisingly, it’s often one of the most ignored aspects when designing your website. Whenever someone asks us to create a website, we ask them about their target audience. Ideally the answer will be quite detailed description of a social group at a specific age and with specific interests. Sadly, most often, the answer is more like: “Our product is for everyone between the age of 3 to 103 years old”.

Perhaps you don’t pay much attention to this, fearing that by narrowing the audience you deprive yourselve of the opportunity to attract customers from outside the focus group. However, by addressing your message to the very large and diversified group, you risk that no one will respond. You will attract no one.

That is why it’s so important to know exactly what your target audience is.

Lose The Industry Lingo

Each industry has its own unique vocabulary. In every profession we can find terms and phrases understandable only to the insiders. Unfortunately, too often professional vocabulary find it’s way to the website. There is nothing wrong with it, if our customers are other professionals from the same industry. However, if the recipient is someone unfamiliar with the topic at hand, the industry lingo can scare them off. People who don’t understand what they read, feel embarrassment and discomfort. And it’s highly unlikely that someone who feel uncomfortable on our website will become our customer.

Therefore try to present your company or your products in the simplest words, at least at the very beginning. You can still use professional terminology on pages with more detailed descriptions.

Less Is More

Remember that simplicity is the most effective tool. Refrain from mentioning each and every single one of the advantages of your product. Try to limit yourself to the most important three. People have less and less time to spend, and thus the period of time that they are able to focus on one thing is shrinking. Make sure that you respect their time by displaying only the most relevant information. You can write about something in detail on a sub page. If anyone want more details they will eventually find that information.

Mom’s Test

In case of larger companies and web projects with bigger budget it’s good to invest in usability tests. It basically means presenting the website to a group of random people from your target audience and observing how they will make use of it.

The person conducting those test remains a passive observer and collects information on the activities performed by the subject. In this case, he or she pays particular attention to how quickly someone is able to reach the desired information or perform a specific action. Of course, usability tests are extremely valuable, but often for smaller businesses too expensive. In such a situation, I highly recommended the Mom’s test. Show your website to your mother, grandmother, aunt, anyone who don’t know exactly what you do. If the response you hear will be: Oh, well, it looks beautiful dear child, but I’m not familiar with the concept and I don’t quite understand the internet. This means that you are doing something wrong. Simplifying the content in this case is the most effective method.

Write For People

Often we focus so much on our website being SEO and mobile friendly, that we forget it should be human friendly first. And it should be easy to use and understandable for humans. Make it your main focus while preparing the website’s content. You will figure out the rest later.

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