Good content for your website will bring you more shares, earn backlinks for your site and gain the trust of your visitors. We are in a time when it is difficult to capture a reader’s attention. People spend fewer seconds on pages than they used to.
To top that, you have to provide visitors with good content that can be optimized for the web and captures the reader’s attention. These tips will help you give your content the attention it deserves.
- Know your listeners
Before you start writing, who are you targeting with your content? Which target group do you want to reach? The primary audience is your customers, while your secondary audience is everyone else who will need your services later. Make your content accessible and interesting. Are you answering all the questions your audience might have questions about?
- Stay away from keyword stuffing
Keywords are very important when writing for the web, but using too many of these keywords is frowned upon. The keywords make it easy for your readers to read your content. It also makes your content valuable and search-friendly. If you overdo the keywords, your work will only look unreliable to your readers and also to Google. It looks like low-quality content and you get a high bounce rate. Over time, this can cause problems with the search engines.
- Arouse emotions in your readers
Your content should convey something to your readers. Your headline should make your readers click, your introduction should captivate your readers and make them stay, while your content should convey something to the reader.
- Make your content reader-friendly
Attention spans of online readers are a bit short these days, so keep it short. Keep your paragraphs short, your sentences short, and avoid repetition. As you write, make sure your sentence structure, tone of voice, style, and word choice inspire readers to take action. Avoid using the passive.
- Link your articles
As you write content, you realize that there are topics that you refer to frequently. Instead of repeating these points or writing new blog posts about them, link back to them. This saves you time, helps search engines know that your site has similar content, improves your search results, makes your content useful, and helps keep it fresh. Search engines use these links to understand how pages on your site are related.
- keyword research
Now that you know your audience, use keyword research tools like AdWords Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer. This way you can find out what your target audience is searching for on Google. This also helps you find out how competitive a keyword is. Incorporate these keywords into your content as you write.
Look for secondary keywords that blend into your content. They help you rank for a variety of long-tail keywords, resulting in more traffic to your site.
- Keep your content simple
Too much jargon will send your audience away. Use simple and easy-to-understand language.
- Write for your audience, not for search engines
Make sure your content includes keywords, but don’t force them into your sentences in a way that doesn’t make sense or sounds weird. Also, make sure the keywords you are targeting are relevant to your audience. Whether a keyword has high search volume or not, ask yourself, is it relevant to my target audience?
- Link your sources
If you use content from another website, make sure you hyperlink to it. Cite your sources because it’s the right thing to do. This may also earn you a reciprocal link or offer in the future.
Citing sources also shows that the information you provide is credible.
- Edit your content
Make sure your work is refined before publishing. Use tools like Grammarly to check grammar and sentence structure. Check the spelling mistakes and only use words that you are sure of the meaning.
- Use social media to measure success
You write content to get you results. So how do you measure the impact of the content you write?
-
Use Google Analytics. This helps you track your website traffic.
-
Use social media advertising. Identify what content gets likes, comments, and shares and what doesn’t. Use this information to customize the type of content you provide.
- Make your content easy to scan
Most web readers these days scan a page for the relevant information they need. That means you should put your most important information at the top and make sure your text is easy to scan. You can do this by:
-
Using lists instead of one big block of text.
-
Use subheadings to divide your work into sections. The headings guide the reader in navigating your site.
- Use pictures and videos
Incorporate this into your content because studies have shown that the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Charts, graphs, and infographics are also better for explaining information.
How do you get your content to engage your readers? share with us
