The success of your website depends on clear, relevant, useful content meeting the needs of your audience. It’s the main factor search engines use when ranking websites which, will keep your visitors coming back.
The best content:
- Meets your audience’s needs
- Grabs their attention
- Is easy to read and understand
- Stays relevant and timely
- Encourages people to share it
- Informs, educates, entertains, or inspires
Great content meets the needs of your audience
Think about why visitors are coming to your website and what you offer. Provide clear, useful content to meet their needs, solve a problem, or provide help. Good work should inform, educate, entertain, or inspire your readers. It is more about quality composition. Arranging the parts of a work is key. Spelling, arrangement, word choice, and proofreading are essential to determine how something was composed.
You need to get and hold your visitor’s attention
With so many competing websites it’s important to grab your visitor’s attention. Good design can guide your readers to your best content. Combine this with clear headings, a logical structure, and concise text to add value for your audience.
Ensure your content is easy to read and understand
Always create content with your audience in mind, and never assume they have the same level of knowledge as you. Your words should be easy to read and understand, so they’re accessible to every visitor. Apps like Hemingway and Plagly’s Grammar Check Tool can check your content for readability, spelling, proofreading, grammar, and more.
Keep your content relevant and timely
The best content is “evergreen.” This means it’s relevant whether a visitor is reading it now or a year or two in the future. It’s important to regularly update your website and schedule new articles. One of the signals search engines use is recency, so publishing often will help your search engine results.
Encourage people to share your content
After search engines, social media is the main way many websites get traffic. Make sure every page on your website has social media sharing buttons for the most popular social networks. A good headline and thumbnail image can increase the chances of getting shared. Aways include a privacy policy and terms. If you offer products or services to your customers, make sure you have comprehensive terms and conditions in place. Every website should also have a privacy policy explaining how you collect and use data from your visitors.
Inform, educate, entertain, or inspire
One of the ways to create compelling work is by asking the question “Will this inform, educate, entertain, or inspire my audience?” Good content should always achieve one of these goals, great content might achieve two or more.
Informative content
This type of composition shares advice and information with your visitors. It’s designed to increase knowledge and helps your audience explore different topics. This often includes news, research, places, resources products, services and tools. Word choice, composition, and combining harmonious parts is an art that requires practice to get right.
Educational content
Educational often takes the form of “how to” guides and tutorials. It’s designed to help people learn new skills and achieve specific tasks. For example, “How to Expertly Summarize a Document” is a great article to help learn about summarizing. This type of content often includes support articles, knowledge bases, online courses, and reviews.
Entertaining content
This type helps your visitors pass the time in an interesting and fulfilling way. Quizzes, games, humor, stories videos, memes, and apps are all good examples of entertaining content.
Inspirational content
Inspiring content often creates some type of emotional change in your visitor. This type of content is the most difficult to write, but it’s also responsible for some of the most popular and shared stories. Inspiring content often takes the form of personal stories, opinion pieces, and creative writing.
It’s worth spending time and resources to source and create great content. A great blog for tips to succeed as a freelance writer will inspire you to get started with your writing career. Search engines scan your content so they can show the most relevant websites to their visitors. Regularly publishing high-quality content is one of the best ways to get good rankings in search results This will drive more visitors to your website.