Everything you need to know about writing content for your new website!
When talking about web design, “content” refers to all of the text on your website that tells your customers about who you are and what services you offer. If you’ve just purchased a website from LinkNow Media, you have a site that already includes content created by our professional writing staff. However, many of our clients want to customize their content and make it a bit more personalized. This blog post is a quick guide to making the most of your website content.
What is content for?
Website content serves two purposes: the first is to give your website’s visitors the information they need to decide whether they want to purchase your products or services. The second purpose is to help Google and other search engines understand what your site is about so that customers can find your site in the first place. In the web design industry, making your website easy to find is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. The slightly tricky thing about writing website content is finding a way to serve both purposes at the same time.
How does SEO work?
When people are searching for a website, they usually don’t know exactly what they’re searching for, but type some general words or a question about a service into a search engine. The point of SEO is to convince Google and other search engines to show people your website when a customer searches for something related to your business. For example, if you run a plumbing business, you want your website to be one of the first Google results when someone searches for “how to fix a clogged drain.”
In the old days, most Internet users searched for products and services by using keywords. A hungry New Yorker might have typed “good pizza new york” into Google, so it was important for pizzerias to fill their websites with those keywords. These days, most people use Google by asking questions in conversational language, so now our hungry New Yorker might type “what is the best pizza place near me?” To reflect the way most people search, Google has changed the way they deliver results to give a lot more ranking to websites that can answer questions like this, and keywords are not nearly as important as they once were.
What does this mean when I’m writing content for my website?
All this means is that the content on your website should focus on answering the questions your customers might have. This means that good SEO is easier than it sounds, because all you have to do is tell your customers about your business by answering the questions they might be typing into Google. You can include phrases like, “Our customers tell us that we serve some of the best pizza slices in New York!” or “Our workers have lots of experience in building and installing kitchen cabinets,” or whatever else would make sense for your business. You don’t have to make lists of your services that are filled with keywords; if you give your website visitors the information they want, your content will be doing everything it needs to do, and your search ranking should take care of itself.
Why? When you are providing a good source of information to your customers they are more likely to share that information with others. Facebook sharing is an excellent example of this. Have you ever read a news article you might not otherwise know about because one of your friends shared it? The same can be true when you create a great resource of information for your visitors. Search engines don’t only look at your website to determine where it will show up in the search results for a particular query. They actually analyze more than 200 different factors including what people are saying about your website on social media, other websites that are linking to it, how long people stay on your website, how quickly your website serves up its information and much more. Regardless of all these factors, well-written content plays one of the most important roles.
The best advice we could possibly give you would be to create 100% customized content for your website. The purpose of the pre-written content is to provide you with a starting point and to save you time taking your new website live on the internet. After your site does go live – your next task should be to completely re-vamp the content so that you can engage your users with helpful and interesting information about your products and/or services in a way that our pre-written content never could. Even if you only change 1 page at a time it does not matter. Search engines love fresh and updated text content. Your website should never be “finished”; you should be focusing on building it into a fantastic resource for your customers over time.
What if I’m still not sure how to write effective content?
If you’re having trouble, or writing just isn’t one of your strengths, LinkNow Media offers a custom content writing service for $70 per page. With this service, we’ll send you a questionnaire to fill out so you can tell us about what makes your business unique, and then one of our professional writers will produce high quality content for you that will both inform your customers about your business and provide good SEO to help your ranking.
Whether you choose to use this service or you want to write your content yourself, just remember that your website’s content is one of its most important features. However, as long as it’s answering the questions that your visitors have, it will be doing its job, and you can get back to running your business and serving your customers.