Digital Marketing Insights

You have less than 7 seconds to impress a visitor when they come to your website. If you fail to do so, they are outta there and most likely not going to be coming back. So what’s the key to making visitors stick around past those 7 crucial seconds you ask? Effective website content!

Content is one of the most important aspects of a website and if it is not engaging and valuable to your visitor they will quickly move on. Alright, let’s not waste anymore time. Here are 5 steps for creating effective website content that will ensure those visitors stick around.

Step 1: Know Your Audience

If you don’t know who your audience is and what they care about, then how are you suppose to write content that helps meet their needs and wants? Knowing your audience and what they care about is essential to creating effective website content.

Start by creating a detailed list of your buyer personas–semi-fictional characters that represent your ideal customer. Creating buyer personas will help you to better understand who you are targeting and what kind of information they are looking for. Once you understand their needs and wants you will be able to create better and more targeted content that they find valuable and keeps them around.

Step 2: Grab Attention

Producing content that your audience finds valuable is the first step–secondly, you need to format this content so it is easy to read and grabs the readers’ attention. Even if your content is targeted and valuable to your audience, it may not be read if the layout or title is wrong. One of the best ways to do this is by using bullet points and headlines.

Bullet points help to break up a lot text on a page and makes the content stand out and easier to read. Use bulleted lists to highlight benefits and emphasize important information.

Headlines are extremely important as they are usually the first thing the visitor reads on the page and determines if they want to continue reading. Headlines should have a catchy title that grabs the readers’ attention and tells them what the page is about. As well, headings and sub-headings makes the content easier to read as they guide the reader’s eye from section to section.

Step 3: Don’t Forget to Optimize!

Writing content for your audience is critical, but that doesn’t mean you should forget about search engine optimization – or SEO. Keywords and SEO are still important when it comes to creating effective website content because your audience needs to be able to find your site. Determine which keywords are relevant and will help visitors find you and include them in your headline as well as naturally throughout the text on your site. Optimizing your content for search engines while still creating valuable content for your audience will ensure your site is found.

Step 4: Stay Current

Nobody likes content that is out-of-date; especially visitors who are coming to your site hoping to find valuable information. It’s essential that you are regularly updating your website’s content as well as creating fresh new content. This will help not only in improving your SEO, but also ensures that visitors stick around when they come to your site.

Now, I understand constantly updating your website pages can be very time-consuming and it’s not necessarily something you want to be doing every other day. Therefore, a great way to keep your website from becoming “stale” is to create fresh new content by blogging regularly. To learn more about blogging for your business and taking advantage of this opportunity to create fresh content check out “How to make your business Blog better.”

Step 5: Measure Success

Once you have created your website content, it is important to monitor what is working and what is not. Measuring the success of your content will help you to understand which content users are finding valuable and which content needs to be improved.

Google Analytics is a great (and FREE!) reporting tool available that tracks your website visitors and helps identify which content is performing best. Using this information you can continue to create content that is useful and update any information that isn’t resonating with the visitor.

Making a lasting impression on your visitors is crucial and creating effective website content is the key to not only making your visitors stick around, but keeping them coming back time and time again.

What steps are you currently taking to create effective website content? Share your comments below!

admin
Mouneeb is an experienced digital marketing strategist with a passion for helping clients achieve their goals online. With over 15 years of experience in designing, developing, and managing a team that develops top-notch web projects, he brings a wealth of information to the teams that he leads and the leaders that he follows.
0%

Get the latest digital insights in your inbox