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Your Content Writing Checklist

At last count, there were nearly two billion websites in the world. By the time you’ve read this, there’ll be a few hundred more. So, why should people visit yours? A Digital Marketing Agency can help you with that. But once they’re there, why should they stay? The quality of your website content is key to holding the attention of your potential customers, and that content includes your writing.

A lot of attention is paid to a website’s visual appeal, but the words you use must make an impact as well. A picture may paint a thousand words, but good content writing will put that picture into context and tell the full story of who you are, what you do, and how well you do it. To convey those things, here is a quick and easy checklist to follow:

  • Know your audience. Don’t start writing without knowing who you’re trying to connect with. Create a customer persona to determine what the core of your main audience looks like. What questions or pain points might they be seeking the answers for? What information do they require? What might they be searching for in search engines, and what are the keywords they’ll use? The answers to these questions will help you optimise your written content with the right keywords, information, and solutions.
  • Website keywords should appear several times in your text. These are the keywords we suggest you use, or the words and phrases that potential clients may enter into a search engine when looking for a company that provides your product or service. Don’t overstuff keywords into your content as you may be penalised with a lower search ranking for doing so. As experts in Search Engine Optimisation, we can help you get the balance right.
  • Never let your most important message be buried underneath less relevant content. While you may be tempted to build up to some sort of grand reveal, it is best to structure your content like an upside-down pyramid; key information at the top takes up most of the text, followed by supporting information and more specific content.
  • Use short sentences where you can with a focus on including nouns and verbs; use adverbs (words that describe verbs) and adjectives (words that describe nouns) carefully as they can clutter your content.
  • Use appropriate voice and tone to convey your attitude about your niche subject to your target audience. Voice is who the audience will hear “talking” while they read your website, and tone is the way content is written. You can use your voice to express your business personality, core values and set yourself apart from your competition so it’s important that you are authentic and easy to recognise. Classic examples of voice and tone include “Empowering and uplifting”, “ Friendly yet informative”, and “Professional, positive and ambitious”
  • Refrain from telling your audience how good you are – instead, tell them how good you will be for them. Show them you understand their pain points or problems, and that you know how to resolve them. Paint a word picture so they can visualise how you will help in delivering the solution.
  • Speak in a language your audience understands. Content terminology should be closely associated with your products, services and branding so your readers know what you’re referring to. The jargon you use with your colleagues should be replaced with plain and non-technical English that will connect and make sense to your website visitors.
  • Any written content needs to be easy to skim read and should be visually rich. Time-poor readers will scan a webpage to find the information they’re after and if they don’t locate it in seconds, they’ll go elsewhere. Avoid text-heavy long paragraphs and divide content into sections (like we have in this post) to help visitors navigate the page quickly. Pictures, images, graphs, charts, infographics or video will also break up big blocks of text and add easy-to-understand context to your content: our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 % of information transmitted to the brain is visual. But as we’ve said, you can’t rely on visual content alone. Words add credibility and personality to your website.
  • Make the most of internal linking to other valuable information on your website. By hyperlinking certain words (anchor text) or phrases to articles on your site, you continue to engage with your content and further build on your reputation as an expert in your field. Crucially, internal links are also a big part of your on-page SEO.
  • You must include a Call To Action (CTA) on every webpage. A CTA prompts your website visitor to perform an action that will further progress their customer journey with you. It should be easily identifiable to identify and might include something like “Sign Up”, “Click Here To Learn More”, “Buy Now”, “Download” or even “Contact Us”.

For now, our CTA is for you to find out more about content writing and how it fits into your digital marketing campaign. They will guide and advise you every step of the way. Together, you can make your words work.

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