9 tips for creating high-quality content for your website

In this article, we’d like to share nine tips you can put into practice straight away when writing content for your website.

Tip 1: Make the text scannable.

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, website visitors read between 20 and 28 per cent of a website. Their argument is that most of us tend to skim rather than read. Our text should therefore be easy to skim, so that more people see and ‘read’ our information.

Here are a few ways to achieve this:

• Using bullet points
• Write short paragraphs to break up the visual flow of the text and give your eyes a rest
• Use white space and spacing between characters, lines and paragraphs
• Organise information using headings and subheadings

Tip 2: Understand who your target audience is.

Your texts should always be written with your specific target audience in mind. You should therefore think carefully about the group of people you are writing for before you start writing.

To help you with this, you could ask yourself the following questions:

• What sort of people make up your audience?
• What are these people’s goals, and how can you help them achieve them?
• How do these people address you? What language do they speak?

Once you understand who your audience is, you can tailor your message to the people or organisations you are addressing.

Tip 3: Keep the reader’s benefit in mind.

How will your words solve their problem, and will you answer their questions and address their concerns before they even raise them? Your experience, references and testimonials are some ways of demonstrating that you or your product can deliver the desired result for your client.

Tip 4: Include a call to action

Once we’ve finished writing the content, we can direct visitors to various pages on our website. On our ‘About’ page, for example, we could direct visitors to our favourite blog posts on copywriting. Or we could invite them to sign up to our email list, or include a link to the ‘Contact’ page or our ‘Services’ page.

Think carefully about how you want to guide your users through the site and what your actual aim is in terms of what you want to achieve with the visitor, e.g. a contact enquiry.

Tip 5: Write the way you speak.

Although you might think that speaking professionally means saying ‘not’ instead of ‘not’ or speaking formally, we can still write in a warm and friendly tone by addressing someone as the person they are.

You can blend the personal with the professional by using contractions or even a word such as ‘you’ to address the reader directly.

And, of course, you still need to exercise discretion. Some sectors are more professional than others (e.g. an investment bank where everyone wears a suit, as opposed to a more casual tech company).

Tip 6: Communicate using direct, precise and factual information.

It is more important to communicate our value clearly than to be clever. For one thing, we should edit our text and use only the words we need.

On the other hand, when we add facts, we provide ourselves with evidence within the context of the outside world that extends beyond our own short-sighted view of ourselves. Even if we are right about ourselves, it helps when someone else says so too.

Tip 7: Use headings.

A heading allows us to address a specific group or convey a particular message that we want to highlight on the page. So use headings to engage your audience straight away and show them that they’ve come to the right place.

For example, if you go to the homepage of the music streaming service Spotify, you’ll see the headline: “Enjoy music without ad breaks, offline playback and more. Cancel at any time.”

Spotify is aimed at people who simply want to listen to and enjoy music.

Tip 8: Ask, ‘So what?’

For a copywriter, the aim would be to write for more than just fun, wouldn’t it?

The ultimate aim would be to help someone achieve a goal. So we should find out what that goal is – the benefit.

Is it to foster a better understanding of a concept or an idea? Could it be to help someone attract more people to their email list? To describe the offer in a way that encourages more people to buy?

If we identify the benefit, we can understand a person’s motivation for acting in their own interests. We can then tailor our writing accordingly.

Tip 9: Improve the user experience with an optimal loading time.

If a page takes longer than a moment to load, it affects our experience. This doesn’t really have anything to do with writing, but it is nonetheless something that can impair our ability to communicate quickly and effectively. So avoid large images or a carousel of scrolling images, which increase the loading time.

So that’s it, well, not quite. There’s a lot of information on how you should write for your website if you’re building one for yourself.