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7 Website Content Creation Tips to Help You Stand Out

By Tri |  Apr 1, 2020 (5 min read)

Branding | Marketing | SEO

The internet is a BIG place.

To keep things in perspective, in 2020, there are close to 2 billion websites online right now.

However, close to 90% of those 2 billion websites are not currently active. That means that only 10% of all websites online are active, and that equates to roughly 200 million live sites.

(Note: If you’re curious to know more statistics about activity online in 2020, check out these live stats.)

200 Million sites is still a huge number. And it means that there is a lot of content out there for you to compete with.

How Do You Compete with So Much Content?

The silent chatter of the web is so loud, and there’s so much information out there that it might seem impossible for anyone to notice the content you put out on your site.

However, with proper planning and strategy, the content that you want to show the world can, and will, get noticed.

In this article, we’ll look at seven expert tips for creating written content for a website. We will look at how to stay in line with best practices, how to rank higher, and how to get more users reading your work.

1) Know Your Audience

When you’re looking to start writing content for a website, the most important thing to understand is who is likely to be reading it.

While writing something is better than not writing anything, you shouldn’t be wasting your time by writing content that isn’t going to be shown to the right users. 

You may already have a great writing style, and many users may find the content interesting. But if those users aren’t relevant and aren’t going to be progressing down your marketing funnel, you might need to rethink your approach.

To help decide who your target audience is, ask yourself some questions:

  • Who is my ideal audience? New customers? Existing customers?
  • Will the content that I’m going to be publishing provide value to them?
  • Have I conducted keyword research to know what terms my audience is searching for?
  • Who are my competitors in this space? What are they sharing on their sites?
  • Does my content address any pain points? Does it help customers overcome them?

Asking these questions is the catalyst to understanding how to approach your content writing for your website. 

It’s essential to put yourself in the shoes of your audience and ask if the information you’re putting out provides value.

The more questions you have answered in the beginning, and the more insights you have to work with, the more effective your website content will be

2) Don’t Plagiarize from Competitors

While this tip might seem like common sense, plagiarism happens more often than we realize. While it’s easy to copy and paste content from another website, it’s something that needs to be avoided at all costs.

Even if you aren’t the best content writer in the world and are struggling with writer’s block, just don’t do it. 

Acts of plagiarism may not always be immediately caught, but doing so will come back to haunt you in the long run. Today, Google’s algorithm detects most acts of plagiarism. Your website rankings will usually take a hit, and may even become deindexed from the search engines entirely.

If you’re writing content and need to use a sentence or two from another source, that’s ok. Just remember to cite the source that it came from. One way you can approach this is by actually quoting the sentence, or using hyperlinks. 

Hyperlinks are clickable text on a page that directs you to a webpage. This is usually the source of the content you’re using. It gives credit to the original author while also showing your audience you have access to valuable resources for them.

When users click on the link, they’re directed to the source. This not only protects you from plagiarism but provides the source with a backlink. It’s a win-win for both websites.

3) Keep Your Content Organized

The last thing that readers want is a giant wall of text without any paragraph structure. This approach is a surefire way to make the user abandon the webpage before they even get started reading it. 

Make sure to break out your sentences into paragraphs and use header tags. Also, make sure that the content under these header tags is pertinent to the heading itself. 

Using header tags to structure your content is crucial not only for the reader but also for the search engines. 

When you use header tags properly, website crawlers can understand what the content is about, and it improves the likelihood of ranking for keywords. Headings also make articles easier to skim and provide better readability

4) Keep Your Sentences Short

To help your website visitors to have a better experience, it’s best to keep your sentences short.

Having a paragraph that’s made up of a lot of sentences can become overwhelming to read. This doesn’t help your overall readability, and users might want to skim the content.

Ideally, keep your sentences less than ten words if you can. Depending on the industry you’re writing for, try to keep paragraphs less than 6-7 sentences long. 

And keep your paragraphs to about one to three sentences long. 

5) Don’t Try to Keyword Stuff

Keyword stuffing ‘refers to the practice of loading a webpage with specific keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results’

This tactic is considered a black hat SEO technique and can land you in hot water with the search algorithms. Your website can suffer a significant rankings decrease.

When writing your content, write naturally for your audience. Of course, you want to include pertinent keywords to improve your relevance, but make sure you don’t just throw in the same keywords a bunch of times.

Modern search engine algorithms are very advanced. They can also understand the semantic language or the meaning of words. Adding in semantic keywords provides more depth and helps the search engines understand your content better.

The best thing you do is conduct keyword research, and then try to add the keywords into your content naturally instead of just throwing the keyword in there into a sentence.

For example, let’s say the topic you’re writing about is cars, and the keyword you want to use is ‘how do I change a tire?’

Instead of plugging that keyword into a sentence just to add it in, use that keyword as a header topic, and then talk about the steps for changing a tire from start to finish. 

This approach helps answer the question, and there is also a chance you can be rewarded with a featured snippet on the SERP.

6) Use Visuals For Impact

While having quality content is imperative, don’t forget to incorporate visuals and multimedia into the mix whenever possible. 

Visuals help to break up the text and can include images, videos, and gifs.

They are beneficial to the user because they provide additional context, are visually appealing, and give a mini-break from reading just pure text.

Adding in multimedia is also good for SEO because it helps to improve the average time on page, yields stronger branding, and provides a better user experience.

7) Use CTA’s (Calls to Action)

A call to action is something that you want your audience to do. 

CTA’s can include signing up for emails, filling out forms online, making purchases, and so on.

We’ve all come across these at some point in our online searches.

While the goal of a great CTA is to make it clear and easy to respond to, don’t make it too generic. 

Address a customer pain point, and users will be more willing to follow through.

 

In your quest to write great website content, be sure to write for users, not just for search engines. This is a crucial point many writers miss – the internet is for humans to help each other through information.

Be sure to keep an eye on how your website content is doing with web traffic tools such as Google Analytics (which is free). You’ll be able to track important KPI’s and measure performance over a period of time.

Implement these tips, and you’ll be well on your way to creating a great website that users will be more inclined to visit and will want to keep coming back to.

 

 

Brandastic is an award-winning SEO agency with offices in Orange CountyLos Angeles, and Austin. We specialize in Content Marketing, SEOPPC, and SMM, Reach out to us today to see how we can help you Ignite your Potential and reach your goals.

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