1. Answer the big questions: Oh hey, remember this tip from writing your core content? The best blog topics to make your customers AND search engines happy is answering questions people ask about your products or services. If your customer service team or contact emails reveal common questions, turn them into topics. You can take a question from your FAQs and turn it into a great blog post.
Build your pizza: how to write tasty website content
That dreamy slice may be your top pick because of the specialty crust, but it isn’t only great because of the crust. If the sauce, cheese, or toppings don’t work, a savoury crust goes to waste. It’s the glorious harmony of these key ingredients that makes the perfect pie.
The Crust
Your website’s crust is your core content. It’s the reason customers come to you: what you sell or do that solves a problem they have. You couldn’t properly represent your business online without it.
When we help clients gather their content for a new web design, we get them to start with their core content. You talk about your products or services all day, either within your team or with customers. This is the place you’re a subject matter expert, so it’s often the easiest to write.
5 Tips to Write Strong Core Content
1. Write like a human: Refer to the list in the top section to find the ideal writing style. Your website is for your customers, so you need to describe products and services in the words they would use and understand. Avoid industry-speak and technical jargon, then check yourself by having a friend outside your industry read your copy to see if it makes sense to them.
Envisio is a cloud-based strategic planning platform that’s popular with government organizations. Their copy is easy to read for the type of person who might be great at strategic planning, but not an expert in software:
2. Make it all about them: Rather than just describing what you do or offer, describe the direct benefit to your customer. How will it make their daily life better, easier, or more efficient? If you focus on writing about desirable outcomes, you stand a better chance of making the conversion.
A well-written case study isn’t just quickly describing what you did and why you’re awesome. It should allow the reader to see how you helped a business like theirs achieve an exciting outcome, so that they can see how you might do the same for them.
3. Less is more: Even if you have a complex product, such as software, your main pages shouldn’t look like a wall of copy. The goal of B2B core content is to start the conversation – get the customer to make contact.
If you need to share heavy details like product specs or troubleshooting guides, you can offer that information in creative ways that don’t overwhelm everyone else viewing that page: expandable content blocks on individual product pages, downloads, FAQs, or a Resources page.
Motio offers custom software that improves the experience of using complex business intelligence software. Their simple, human overviews make the benefits super clear! And if a visitor wants to know more, they have product detail pages with overviews and downloads.
4. Answer the big questions: Speaking of FAQs – use your data on the questions customers ask to provide that information up front. Some websites have an FAQs page, while others include FAQs on each product or service. Remember that your website serves visitors 24/7. Providing answers outside office hours, when someone is researching your business, can help you get that lead instead of a competitor.
5. Boost it with social proof: You don’t have to write all of the words on your website. In fact, testimonials can increase conversions by 34%! Rounding up Google and Facebook reviews, or soliciting testimonials from clients, can give you an excellent piece of core content to improve your product and service pages.
The Sauce
McDonald’s definitely didn’t invent the idea of a secret sauce – but most people first hear the expression from fast food marketing. Jack in the Box has Jack’s Secret Sauce, and KFC has its 11 mysterious herbs and spices.
4 Tips to Write Saucy Standout Content
1. Write like a human: Yes, I’m repeating myself. But that’s because there are so many awesome companies with websites that sound uptight, convoluted, or just nothing like their brand. Talk about your differentiator to a friend, and pay attention to which parts make you both the most excited or interested.
Tools for Better Writing
I can’t teach you a course on writing in this post, although I have experience with that! But I do get that you might be nervous about your ability to string sentences together. Honestly, the best thing to do is get it all out, then read it aloud to yourself and get a friend to read it as well.
Hopefully these insights put you on the ‘write’ track (humour me, it’s been a long post) toward great website content! Remember to be human, address the things your customers care about, and make it mobile-friendly. When in doubt, reach out! We’d love to help you serve up tasty content to your customers.
Pam Berg
With backgrounds in journalism, computer forensics, and public libraries, it’s no wonder Pam’s obsessed with uncovering the hidden stories in data and developing strategies. Writing long-form optimized articles is her other jam. Her Instagram feed is equal parts horses, waffles, and drag queens.
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Create a Site Map
Next, as you audit your content, set aside time to create a custom site map as well. Your content audit uncovers opportunities and weaknesses that need to be addressed during the creation of your new website. A site map ensures you have a clear picture of how current and future content work in tandem to provide an excellent experience for the end-user.
While it’s time-consuming, mapping your current website reveals how visitors navigate your website. Then, it’s up to you to build with this in mind—organizing your content to direct website visitors towards conversion opportunities.
If you’re in need of a tool to create a visual sitemap, we use and recommend Gloomaps. This tool will help you organize your thoughts and content. With a more robust website, you may only need to focus your sitemap on the main website pages. The point of this exercise is to bring clarity, not bog things down.
You will understand how your current navigation works.
You will identify content gaps.
Take note of the content you’re missing, for example, a newer product that never got a dedicated product page or supporting blog content on a major product. Identify the content you need to create and determine if it’s essential content you need now or a future effort to account for at a later date.
You’ll find pages that are now irrelevant.
Highly effective marketing teams treat their website as a living, breathing marketing asset. As a result, there are often many pages created and sometimes pages that become forgotten. Identifying these pages will save you time, so you don’t just recreate every page on your existing website.
Conduct Keyword Research
You’ve audited your content and created a site map. Now, if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to conduct keyword research. This step provides deeper insight into how your current content is performing. Your keyword research will give you a baseline from which you can grow.
Additionally, it’s another opportunity to look at more potential content gaps. If there are high-intent keywords you aren’t ranking for, this is a prime opportunity. Create a content roadmap to rank for more keywords that will drive revenue.
If you’re looking for a tool, we use and highly recommend SEMRush . They have a 14-day free trial and free training academy , so you can quickly get started and make sure it’s the right fit for you. There are other programs available like MOZ and Ahrefs too. Within SEMRush, create a Site Project, and run a website audit. From there, review your organic keywords. This helps you to identify the keywords you are currently ranking for.
Leave Your Content As It Is
If your content is ranking well, or if the content isn’t a high-priority piece of content, just pull it over to the new site. If you set up your redirects correctly, you shouldn’t take too much of a hit in your search engine ranking.
Repurpose the Content
If your content is ranking, but you need it to rank higher, add more information to existing content and republish it as new content. Since Google prioritizes genuinely helpful content, this should help you rank higher.
Build Internal and External Links
Appendix
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. It refers to the process search engines use to decide what results they display, and the order in which they display them when someone conducts a search. As part of that process, they are also trying to display what someone is truly seeking when conducting their search.
To achieve marketing success for your product or webpage on Google or Amazon (or other search engines), you must thus provide on your webpage or product page exactly what customers are searching for. For example, imagine seeking an answer to the question: “What is SEO?” on Google. Below the paid advertisements, Google lists the search results that best respond to your query.
A search result that appears organically in response to searches brings with it a greater amount of authority and credibility than a paid advertiser would, and a customer conducting the search is more likely to trust and use that result. Therefore, to ensure success, your web page or product page must provide customers with exactly what they are looking for through the right titling, content, and purchasing experience. You do this by simply knowing what, when, and how people search for different products or services and then provide it to them.
The secret sauce of long-term and significant success online is being able to match your product to customers’ changing needs and wants while efficiently navigating the complex algorithms that search engines use to choose what to display from the numerous options available once a customer makes a search.
Effective SEO strategy requires the right tools and skill sets across a spectrum of disciplines – from marketing to tech. Still, it is not some code that one can easily crack due to the secrecy with which search engines construct the landscape and because they keep tweaking their algorithms.
Sources:
https://forgeandsmith.com/blog/how-to-write-great-website-content/
https://www.mojomedialabs.com/blog/how-to-organize-and-write-content-for-your-new-website
https://www.upstrategylab.com/blog/write-high-converting-website-pages-b2b