Tips for improving your site content.

The ability to capture your users’ attention and have them relate to your brand through your content is a fine art, and one that can pay dividends if you are able to master it. Most of your site visitors will spend a few seconds on your pages and will then move on unless you can find a way to make them stay a little longer. Thoughtful, engaging and well written content is the key to beating high bounce rates, and is one of the best ways to boost your SEO.

Get to know your audience

The first step to creating effective website copy is to have a good understanding of who you’re writing for and what their preferences will be in terms of content format and topics. Before you start writing, think about who your primary readers are, whether there is a secondary audience that you can reach out to, and how the content can be optimised to expand its reach. It can be extremely helpful to create some customer profiles to cover the different kinds of people who will be engaging with your content to give you a clearer picture of what they’re looking for in your content.

Nail the structure of your content

The way you structure your content has a strong impact on whether your readers will finish the entire piece or not. You can increase your chances of having every word read by following some simple guidance in relation to your content structure. Firstly, make sure all the most important details are at the beginning of your content and follow the inverted pyramid model with your broad information in the first half of the content and the more narrowly focused points towards the end.

Another tip to help you optimise the structure of your content is to keep sentences short and easy to read, and you should consider including a bullet list of the main points at the beginning. Keep jargon and technical terms to a minimum – unless you’re writing academic content, of course, and divide your content into logical sections to make it easier to find the relevant information.

Mix things up with a variety of content types

Long form content such as case studies, blogs, guides and white papers are extremely valuable to include on your website, but these text-heavy formats shouldn’t be the only thing you include. Enhance your users’ experiences and surpass their expectations by including engaging content forms such as animation and video. People tend to process visual information faster than text, and visual formats also make complex ideas easier to understand. You can also use images to break up sections of on-page text to make it more readable and to illustrate the points being made.

The main things to keep in mind when planning your next piece of content is to make sure it is relevant, factually correct, engaging, and answers your users’ questions. Keep your tone of voice in line with your brand’s persona, and aim to add value through your chosen topics by bringing your own unique insights to the table.