Content marketing has been growing in importance in recent years as search engines focus increasingly on the content of websites when ranking them. With this in mind it helps to have a strategy for the content you put on your website. Here are some ideas to help develop one:
Audience
There’s no point trying to write for everyone that may visit your website. It is far better to decide who your main customers are and write for them. They made be the MD of a company who doesn’t have time to read lots of detail and is going to scan your site so headings and bullet points will appeal more than lengthy paragraphs.
Objective
What is the objective of your website? Is it to create a good first impression of your business, to provide customers with product information, to generate enquiries? Understanding the purpose of the site is key to writing relevant content. If generating enquiries is the most important requirement there needs to be a ‘next step’ at the end of each page. Maybe that is taking the reader to another page with more detail on the product or service or maybe it is a contact form.
So what?
It is easy to write statements about your products and services but for most customers the plain facts don’t hold much appeal. They are interested in how you will make their life easier, increase their profits or benefit them in another way. When writing a statement ask yourself “So what?” What is the benefit for your customer of all the features you’ve written about? What will appeal to them?
Keywords
Every page on your website is an opportunity to rank for a different keyword or phrase. That keyword may be the name of the product you are writing about or it could be an industry specific term. When writing it helps to keep your keywords in mind to ensure you include them several times on the page.
Email promotion
When you’ve put lots of effort into writing a good page why not promote it to your customers and those you would like to do business with? This could be a simple email with an overview of the page and link to it.
Measure and optimise
Finally, you need to measure how successful your page is and improve it where necessary. When the page has been live for a few weeks you can see on Google Analytics how many people have visited it, how long they spent on it, how they got there and what they did next.
