The content on your website is one of the most important, yet underrated elements of your website. It can greatly affect your website rankings, can tell a story about your business to new potential customers while also providing valuable information to existing customers. Make sure your website content is checking off all the boxes and speaks to your whole audience. Here are a few ways that you can expand and enhance your website’s content.
Keep It Simple
While writing content for your website, keep things simple and easy to understand. There’s no need for heavy and overwhelming content – you can easily tell a story in short and easy to digest content pieces. Here are a few tips to keeping things simple:
- First and foremost, your website content should always be clear and concise. It should be easy for a new visitor to understand the intent and focus on your website and specific pages.
- Avoid using lengthy paragraphs if possible. Studies have shown that users don’t actively read every word of the page, instead they skim through content to get a better understanding.
- Break up your content in easy to digest sections and use headings to help readers quickly understand what they’re reading.
Tell A Story
Unfortunately, businesses sometimes only focus on ‘sales-ey” website content – the basic service pages, hours of operations, pricing etc. By only having the basics and bare minimum, you’re missing the opportunity to tell a story about your business.
Consider adding content and pages that paint a bigger picture:
- Show customers how your products and services are being used in a real-world setting.
- Share stories, case studies and reviews from recent customers to demonstrate the benefits and solutions your business can provide.
- Beyond that, provide some content that encourages emotions and demonstrates personality and traits about your team and business. Share blogs about recent events you’ve hosted, what you’ve learned, news about your team or causes that you’re passionate about.
Identify Gaps
Look at your website from a potential customer’s perspective. Think of the common questions you receive about your business and services from customers – are those questions and their answers on your website?
Get your whole team involved and talk to various departments. Reaching out to your sales team, customer service team and even your social media management team may reveal some questions you may not have realised are being asked by potential customers.
Providing this information on your website is a valuable way to reach new potential customers. Today customers are doing significantly more research before visiting a store or making a call, so providing customers with information beforehand can help them to convert.
Opportunities to Add Information and Fill Gaps About Your Business
Here are a few areas of opportunity to add content to your website:
FAQ Pages
Answer commonly asked questions about your products and services. Think of all your customers; those who may be in the research phase, those currently using your product and services as well as those who are established customers.
About Pages
Your ‘About’ page should tell a story about the company; where it started, how it came to be, how it has progressed, and about the team/ staff. Explain what your team’s strengths may be, where your team expertise lies, as well as information about your products and services.
Blogs
Blogs have the potential to bring a great deal of traffic to your website, if planned out properly. Unfortunately, many businesses who are publishing blogs, are doing so with no real strategy. They are either publishing too many blogs for the sake of publishing blogs (because they’ve been told to do so) or they are publishing too few with thin content.
Focus on blog topics that you can provide some real value and insight. Spend the time writing more informed and more specific blogs relating to your industry and demonstrate your expertise on the topic. It’s better to create a few well formulated and informative blogs than to create an abundance of quickly-published blogs with thin and repetitive content.
Resources
Do you have supporting documents, white papers, sales and spec sheets lying around? The stacks of printed flyers or catalogues you have scattered around your office, showroom or storefront probably contain useful information about your business or products. Make sure those valuable resources are available on your website by uploading PDF’s or better, creating pages dedicated to specific information.
Keywords
Keywords are key when it comes to content. Keywords help keep your pages and blog posts focussed and help to ensure you’re optimizing properly. Before writing a new blog or website page, always start by identifying what they keyword will be and ensure that that keyword is being used in the important meta information. Once you’ve identified keywords for each of your blogs and pages, it will be easier to review your website and understand where the gaps lie.
Review Existing Content
It’s always a good idea to review your website and expand the content wherever possible. Did you write a blog on a certain topic last year? Read through it and see if there are elements that can be added. Consider these points:
- Did you learn new information on the topic?
- Has some of the information changed or is no longer relevant?
- Have you gained new experience, insights or expertise that you can add?
- Are there dates or details that should be revised?
Consider these points and add additional information where possible. In doing so regularly, you may see improvements in your content performance over time
Avoid Creating Non-Tent
On that same note, it’s important to keep in mind that content should be informative, insightful and provide value. Don’t add content for the sake of doing so. Make sure new content is providing value to the reader.
Put a Plan in Place
After reviewing these tips and tricks, review your own website and identify area’s that can easily be expanded upon or added to by creating a content strategy.
Prioritize what content you want to improve on and decide how often you want to work on your website content. Updating one or two pages a month, can show significant results over time. Enhancing your content doesn’t have to be a daunting task, if you put a structured plan in place.
There are so many unique opportunities to enhance your website content. Review your website regularly and expand where possible. For more information about content marketing, contact the digital marketing specialist at Ontario SEO.
