One of the most important things you can do for your business is write excellent website content. Website content that communicates your message, that truly reflects who you are and what you do. So many businesses struggle with this critical and highly valuable part of their marketing efforts. Writing content can be time-consuming, and when you have so many other things to do in your business, your website content is often rushed, under-developed or just not suitable for the web. Writing for your website is an art-form in itself; you have to understand how your audience reads your website content as well as how search engines read it.

writing for your website is an art-form in itself, you have to understand how your audience reads your website content as well as how search engines read it.

Writing for Web is Just Different

Why? You need to write your business’s content for your human customers, sure, but website content needs to also be written for robots, because at the end of the day, we all want Google to read our website and deliver it to our audience at the top of the pile. Secondly, internet users have a need for speed – they scan your content, they don’t read it the way they do print material. In fact, your average user only has time to read a mere quarter of your content and they make the decision if they will stay on your site in under 8 seconds! If you don’t provide for this, your valued website visitor will bounce away from your site very quickly and move on to your competitors.

The Dreaded Bounce Rate

There is little more frustrating for business owners than to have visitors to your website that leave as quickly as they arrive, hitting that back arrow, back to the search results and onto the next website in the list to find what they are looking for. Maybe you have exactly what they are looking for, but you lost them because they did not find it the second their eyeballs met your home page.

your average user only has time to read a mere quarter of your content and they make the decision if they will stay on your site in under 8 seconds!

5 Tips for Writing Excellent Website Content

So, how do you get people to stay on your site and actually read your content and optimise it for the search engines at the same time?

1. Content your Visitors can Scan. How is your content structured? Have you got taglines, headings, subheadings, lists and short paragraphs? If not, you aren’t catering for the skimmers.
2. Relevant and Valuable Content. This is just as important for the robots as it is for your visitors. While you should always focus on your readers, not the search engines, Google judges your site based on the relevance of your content. Your readers will simply bounce away if your content is not relevant to what they are looking for.
3. Spelling and Grammar. Important in all communication, you want to present your best and most professional image – you can’t do that with spelling and grammatical errors littering your site. Check and re-check and get someone else to check it too!
4. Keep it Concise and Stay On Point. One of the most common mistakes Ingenuity see our clients make is trying to cram in every little piece of information about their business or offering. Understandable! You want people to know everything, and you want to give your visitors as much information as possible to help them make a decision to contact you. But, internet users get frustrated if they have to sift through paragraphs of text or read overly-stuffed paragraphs, no matter how well written they may be.
5. Inverted Pyramid Method. Put your most important information first, state your conclusion, the broad overview, then get into more detail further down the page, and further still to other internal pages.

Follow these tips and start to see improvements in your bounce rate and conversions. Don’t have the time or inclination? Give Ingenuity a call. Thanks for reading!