In Elle’s article “Outfitting Your Content Castle: Writing for Websites,” she discusses the basic elements of developing a content strategy for a website. When creating a new website, the content or copy on the site is one of the most overlooked and important aspects and often ends up being the biggest hold up in the web development process. Strong website content is essential for keeping visitors on your site, improving their user experience and helping them navigate through your sales funnel. Here are five tips for creating strategic website content:

  1. Cater to your Customers – The first step of writing website content is to know who your target audience is, what they know about your business/industry and what they want from your website. Remember that your visitors are likely not industry experts like you are, so your content should come from a simple, educational standpoint. You need to write to their knowledge level rather than yours. Overly technical language and industry jargon may confuse them. An average visitor will only read about 20% of the text on your website so your content needs to be to the point and provide them with what they are looking for right away.

  2. Organization and Navigation – Once you have identified your target website users, the next step is creating a site map, or a plan that outlines and organizes which pages will be on your site. Site maps vary greatly depending on industry but a typical site map includes a Home page, About Us page, Services or Products page, Blog or News page and Contact Us page. A site map also takes into account how a visitor would navigate between these pages and the possible paths they would take.

  3. Building a Blueprint – After the organization of your site has been outlined, each page can be wireframed. Wireframing is essentially building a page by page blueprint. Sketch out the structure of your pages. Determine where the content will go and how much is needed for each page. Wireframing goes deeper than just content writing and also includes some design elements such as the placement of videos, images, infographics, etc. on the page. After wireframing you should have good visual representation of how your finished site will look.

  4. Sprinkling Keywords – When you’ve done the proper planning and are ready to start actually writing the content for your pages, be sure to keep SEO in mind. It’s important to take advantage of industry-relevant keywords to improve your search engine results. But be careful not to overdo it. If you stuff your content with as many keywords as you can think of, search engines will pick up on this and punish you for it in their results. The trick is to “sprinkle” keywords throughout your content where they naturally fit. Successfully optimizing your content for search engines will take some trial and error, but it can greatly improve your traffic.

  5. Maximizing Conversions – The end goal of any content strategy should be conversions. A website conversion is when a visitor takes the specific action that you want them to, whether it be purchasing your product from your site, filling out your contact form, signing up for you newsletter, etc. In order to maximize conversions, your content needs strategically placed calls to action that ask the visitor to take your desired action. Simply put, if you don’t ask, you’ll never get.

Developing content for a website is a complex, strategic process that takes experience to truly master. If your business needs help putting together a content strategy for your site that creates a user-friendly experience and drives conversions, give us a call at 701-478-1111 and ask to speak with a Marketing Advisor, or visit absolutemg.com/contact. We have written engaging content for many sites in a variety of industries and would be happy to help.