The ultimate guide to website content: definition & tips.

Website content is the text, visuals and multimedia elements you put on your website. And it helps determine whether users find your website online — and then choose to do business with your company.

In this guide, we look at everything you need to know about web content. Give it a read and find out how to create and optimise website content, so it gets the best possible results for your business.

Contents

• What is website content?
• Types of website content
• The importance of web content
• How to create a website content strategy
• Best practices for web content creation
• Troubleshooting: how to improve existing website content
• Next-level web content ideas

What is website content?

Website content is the name we give to the textual, visual, and multimedia elements on your website. These elements are designed to inform and engage website visitors.

Imagine your website as a house. Web development takes care of construction. Web design makes the building look beautiful. Web content is the stuff you put inside the house to make it interesting and useful.

Types of website content

We can break website content down into a couple of different categories: written web content, multimedia web content and interactive web content.

Written content for websites includes:

• Web pages (like your homepage, service pages and about page)
• Product descriptions
• Blog posts
• In-depth reports, ebooks and white papers
• Case studies
• FAQs
• Press releases

Multimedia web content includes things like:

• Images
• Illustrations
• Infographics
• Videos
• Webinars
• An embedded podcast

Interactive website content includes features like:

• Quizzes
• Calculators
• Polls
• Maps

You may also hear people talking about user-generated content. This is any content shared by your users — and then used by you on your site. It can include reviews, images and social media posts.

Downloadable website content is another term you’re likely to come across. This is content that users have to download — usually in exchange for their email address.

To tempt users to part with their personal information, downloadable content offers something of value. It could be an ebook or a template that solves a niggling problem for website visitors.

The importance of web content

Now we know what web content is, let’s turn our attention to the importance of high-quality site content. Why should you invest time and money in web content creation? Well, because it achieves all the following for your website and business.

Boosts search engine visibility

Put quality content on your website and your site is more likely to rank highly in search engine result pages (SERPs). You rank for more keywords and there are more pages that search engines can serve to users.

Generates leads and conversions

Website content helps generate leads because potential customers are more likely to come across your brand in SERPs. By including calls to action (CTAs), content also encourages website users to progress to the next stage of your conversion funnel.

Improves audience engagement and retention

Good website content keeps users on your site for longer. There’s plenty for them to do on your site — and lots of useful links guiding users to the next piece of relevant content. This improves page engagement and reduces your bounce rate, which sends good signals to search engines like Google.

Builds customer trust

The content on your website doesn’t always produce instant conversions. However, it does help you build a trusting, long-term relationship with your ideal customers. You can use your website content to showcase your brand personality and share your industry knowledge.

Feeds content marketing efforts

As part of your content marketing strategy, you probably share content on channels other than your website — channels like social media and email. You can use website content to feed these marketing channels, so you’re less likely to run out of things to say.

Earns backlinks for your site

Search engines like sites that have lots of quality backlinks. It shows that other websites think your site content is work linking to. Interesting and useful website content is a great way to earn those backlinks.

How to create a website content strategy

So we’ve seen that there are lots of benefits to creating website content. But how do you go about it? How do you create content that gets results for your business?

As with anything, a bit of strategic thinking helps you get the most bang for your buck. So, it’s best to start by developing a website content strategy. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you do just that.

Step 1 Define your goals

Start by working out what you want to achieve with your website content. Do you want to improve organic traffic? Increase conversions? Or build brand awareness?

Then set SMART goals. Be specific. Decide how you will measure your success. Pick targets that are achievable and relevant. And decide when you expect to see results.

Then, gather your starting metrics so you can judge the impact your website content strategy is having on your website and business.

Step 2 Get to know customers and their journey

The priority when creating website content is always your customers. The stuff you put on your website should inform and engage them. It should also provide them with information relevant to their current stage in the customer journey.

So think about:

• Who your customers are. You may have several different audience segments or just one. Either way, use customer and market research to create customer personas that detail their demographics, behaviour, interests and challenges.
• What your customers need at each stage of their journey. You need to create content relevant to every part of the customer journey. That way, no matter where web visitors are at when they land on your site, you provide useful and persuasive information.

Step 3 Analyse any content you already have

The next step in developing your website content strategy is all about assessing what content assets you already have in place.

To do this, you need to conduct a content audit. This is where you look at all the content on your website to assess its accuracy, relevance and readability. You also look at metrics like organic traffic, user engagement and the number of backlinks each piece of content is getting.

This research tells you:

• Which content users like and which type of content you might like to replicate
• Where there are gaps in your website content, in terms of keywords and the customer journey
• Which pages are irrelevant or under-performing

You can also take this opportunity to assess competitor content, looking for popular topics and content that performs well. This might provide some inspiration for how to differentiate your brand and content from theirs.

Step 4 Decide what type of content you want to create

It can help to base your content around five to six content pillars. These are pillars that relate to different aspects of your business and its offering. For example, here at Radical, our content pillars are:

• Web design
• Web development
• Branding
• E-commerce
• Digital marketing
• How to work with a web design and development agency

All the content we produce falls into one of those six categories. This helps us keep our content consistent and relevant to customers.

At this stage in the strategy process, it’s a good idea to assess your resources too. Can you create a professional-looking video for your website or do you need to get a videographer’s help? The same goes for writing blog posts: can you go it alone or do you need the help of an SEO content writer?

Think about the different types of content you want to create and who will take responsibility for creating them.

Step 5 Brainstorm content ideas and conduct keyword research

With the preliminary research done, it’s time to get as many ideas down on paper as possible. Write down all the content ideas you can think of. Then refine and rank your ideas, organising them around your content pillars.

For any content designed to drive organic traffic, you need to conduct keyword research. Using a keyword tool (you can use Google Keyword Planner for free), you can view:

• Volume: the number of people searching for a particular search term
• Competitiveness: how difficult it is to rank highly for that search term

Type in a collection of keywords and you’ll also get lots of related keyword ideas.

The idea is to find high volume search terms with low levels of competition. Then you can map a primary keyword along with related, synonymous keywords to each piece of content.

Step 6 Create a content calendar

Based on your resources and your content priorities, it’s then time to create a content calendar. This should include the new content you want to create, along with any content updates you want to schedule.

If more than one person is responsible for content creation, it can help to fill your content calendar with guiding information for each piece. This includes information like:

• Goals of the content
• Target audience
• Stage in the customer journey
• Content format
• Assigned content creator
• Keywords (including volume)
• Deadlines for first draft, editing and publication

Also, when scheduling content, bear in mind that you should aim to add new website content at least twice a month. This shows search engines that your website is fresh and relevant — and it helps you get the most from your website content strategy.

Best practices for web content creation

When it comes time to create your content, there are a couple of principles you need to keep in mind.

Follow these rules of web content creation and content doesn’t just sit on your website gathering dust. Instead, it works hard for your website and business, boosting your online presence and building connections with your target audience.

Optimise content for SEO

If you’ve identified keywords for your content, be sure to include them in the following places:

• The title of your content
• A subheading or two
• The body text
• Image alt tags
• Image titles
• Video transcripts
• Meta description

You should also add internal links, linking to other web content where relevant.

Tailor content to your audience

Optimising your content with keywords is important. But stick keywords where they don’t belong and reading your content becomes tricky for website users.

So only use keywords where it feels natural, prioritising the user experience. Also, aim to create content that provides real value for your audience.

Think about a user’s state of mind as they land on your web page. What are their needs and search intent? What do they want to achieve? What do they need to know? Then, create content that ticks all those boxes.

Focus on quality over quantity

You only tend to see results from web content creation if you post new content regularly, at least once or twice a month. However, as we just mentioned, your users come first. So if it’s a choice between lots of poor-quality content or a few pieces of excellent content, choose quality over quantity.

Use a distinctive brand tone of voice

Your website content is an opportunity to build connections with your ideal customers. So use your brand tone and voice across all website content. This helps users get to know and trust you better.

Use calls to action

A CTA tells website users what they should do next — and no piece of content is complete without one. Guide users further down your conversion funnel with clear calls to action.

Troubleshooting: how to improve existing website content

So you have a website content strategy up and running and you’ve been posting content for a while. But you’re not getting the results you were hoping for. What do you do?

If you’re looking to improve website content, check that your content is following the principles above. Check for keywords and CTAs. Ensure that your audience and their search intent are the focus of every web page.

And if you feel that you’re getting these things right, consider doing a content audit. This is a process where you analyse all the content on your website, assessing it for accuracy, relevance, readability and user engagement.

Depending on what you find, you can then improve your website content by:

• Improving readability and structure. Make sure your content is easy to read and that information is easy to digest. That might mean breaking up text with subheadings and bullet points. Or using short sentences and paragraphs so users can skim-read your content.
• Adding multimedia content. If your written content doesn’t feature any multimedia content — like images or videos — add some in. This will make your content more engaging for web users and may help you better illustrate your points.
>Updating old content. Ensure that every page on your website provides valuable information for a website user. When content is over a year old, update it to reflect the latest statistics, trends and research. Replace any broken links and ensure your content still fits your brand messaging.

Next-level web content ideas

Following the best practices above helps you to create high-quality content that gets seen by search engines and your ideal customers.

But you can amplify the impact of your web content by sharing it across your other marketing channels. You can share snippets of your web content on social media and in your email marketing, encouraging users to click the link to access the full version.

And don’t stop there. When you’ve mastered the basics, try these next-level ideas to get more from your web content.

Create downloadable content

Use your most valuable content as a lead magnet. Gate your content, so website users can only see it after sharing their email address. This works well for content like ebooks, reports, templates or extensive how-to guides. You can then nurture these warm leads with an email marketing campaign.

Conduct and share some industry research

Backlinks are great for SEO. You can maximise your chances of getting backlinks by putting original research — like survey results or industry statistics — on your website. Content that contains stats and data is often cited by other websites. This builds your authority and improves search engine rankings.

Repurpose your content

Creating website content takes time. But you don’t have to create all your content from scratch. You can repurpose content, turning blog posts into infographics, turning webinars into ebooks and turning videos into written case studies.

Create pillar posts

Pillar posts provide an in-depth look at a topic covered by your website. Related blog posts link to the pillar post and the pillar post links to all related blog posts. This creates a strong website structure. It helps users find what they’re looking for and boosts SEO.

Encourage user-generated content

Content created by your audience sends a powerful trust signal to website visitors. So encourage your audience to create and share content like reviews, videos and social media posts. You can then post this content on your website, reducing your content workload in the process.

Monitor content performance

Use website analytics to see how your content performs. Look at metrics like traffic, views, bounce rate and conversions. You can then replicate your best-performing content and make efforts to improve content that isn’t producing the results you were hoping for.

Create consistent and effective website content with Radical

Creating website content is a big undertaking. Some businesses have whole teams dedicated to the task. But smaller businesses often struggle to create the content they need to keep their site competitive, relevant and visible online.

That’s where we come in. Our web design and development team can build a branded website for you. Then, our graphic designers, animators and writers can fill it with engaging, optimised content.

If you want help taking your website content to the next level, get in touch with the Radical team to chat about your project.

Website content FAQs

How do I add content to my website?

You add content to your website via your content management system (CMS). A good web design and development agency will ensure that your CMS is user-friendly, so it’s easy for you to add new content.

What content should I put on my website?

The content you put on your website depends on your website users and your content creation resources. Web content can include blog posts, ebooks, videos, infographics and interactive content like quizzes.

How do I create great content for my website?

You can create great content by learning about and following content best practices. Alternatively, you can call on content creators — like graphic designers, videographers and content writers — to get the best possible results.

How do I optimise content for SEO?

Start by conducting keyword research and deciding which keyword phrases you want to target. Then include keywords in titles, subheadings, body text, image alt tags, video transcripts and meta descriptions. Just remember that user experience is your priority. Use keywords naturally throughout your content and keep the needs of your audience front of mind.