Your website is a canvas to show the value of your brand—and filling it with the right content is a tall order. Website content writing is a continual process of creating, adjusting, and refining to meet your business's and visitors' needs.
So what should you do—and not do—to make the information you share with the masses useful, informative, and relevant? Follow a few dos and don’ts to point your paintbrush in the right direction.
You practice healthy habits to keep your body and mind on track, so why not do the same for your business? Taking the right approach to website content writing is one habit to put at the top of your list. Here are a few “dos” that can help you with that:
1. Do Understand Your Target Audience
The audience for one piece of content might be different from the audience for another, depending on both the information and your end goal. Research and identify relevant buyer personas—fictional representations of your target audience—and get to know your target audience's needs, preferences, and pain points. Make it your mission to gather a few basic facts about these people, including where they spend their time online, what types of content they respond to, and how they spend their leisure time. Once you get to know your audience, you can tailor your content to resonate with them and address their specific challenges.
2. Do Focus on Benefits
What does your brand bring to the table? If your content is intended for audiences who are in the conversion or decision stages of the buyer’s journey, showcase the value of your product(s) or service(s). People in these groups understand their challenges and needs, so they’re close to pulling the trigger on a possible solution. Whether you integrate bullet-pointed benefits, highlight a real-life example, or combine the two, use your content to show how you can solve your target audience's problems or improve their lives.
3. Do Use a Conversational Tone.
Content that’s “trying too hard” stands out like a sore thumb. It’s easy to overwrite content to make it sound more intellectual, but remember that your readers are human. Forgo the confusing industry jargon and inject some personality by writing with basic language and an approachable tone. Writing conversationally—the way you would talk—humanizes your brand while you work to create subject authority. It makes your audience feel more like you’re chatting one-on-one with them, especially when you address them directly by using the second person or “you” language.
Let’s pull a sentence from above. Which version feels more compelling?
Writing conversationally—the way you would talk—humanizes your brand while you work to create subject authority.
By writing with a conversational tone—or the way in which one would speak aloud—brands can appear more human and improve subject authority.
Good content can bend the rules you learned in high school English (it’s OK to end a sentence with a preposition!), so long as it still respects the intended audience, the brand’s tone, and the topic at hand.
4. Do Tell a Story
Storytelling helps both your brand and your audience. When you tell a story with your content, you increase your chances of drawing people in. Mix in straightforward, factual information with elements that create compelling frames of reference for readers. Let’s say you want to publish a case study on your site. By necessity, it will certainly be data-heavy—but to keep things interesting, you can add context and proof from the customer’s perspective or sprinkle in anecdotes about times your business solved a conflict or challenge.
5. Do Proofread and Edit
Messy content is a major turnoff and can leave your audiences thinking that your brand isn’t worth its salt or doesn’t pay attention to detail. So break out the red pen, activate track changes/suggestion mode, and take the time to ensure your content is pristine.
Whichever word processing system you use can help with basic grammar to resolve:
But you’ll need to go beyond the mechanical editing practices of cleaning up spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You also need to edit for clarity, flow, and coherence: Does your content make sense? Is it easy to read on the page?
6. Do Use Headlines and Subheadings
Ever land on an article or webpage hoping to find an answer to a question, only to be confronted by a wall of text you have to dig through? Audiences are often looking for specific information, and they skim to find it. Clean formatting makes their search infinitely easier. Craft compelling headlines (H2s) and subheadings (H3s and H4s) to grab attention, improve readability, and let your audience know what to expect as they go. As a bonus, headings and subheadings also provide valuable keyword real estate. If you can weave your keyword(s) organically into these spots in your content, you can improve your SEO potential.
7. Do Include Social Proof
Whether you offer wingdings or doodads, prospective customers need to know you provide value. So give it to them straight by answering that all-important question: “Can you solve my problem?” Real customers and real problems speak volumes. You build credibility and trust with your audience when your website content writing includes testimonials, case studies, or reviews that vouch for your products or services. Highly satisfied customers are often willing to provide specifics about their experiences and the problems you solved, offering an unbiased perspective on how great you are.
8. Do Update and Refresh Your Content
Has your brand voice shifted? Is the information on key webpages outdated? Regularly review and update your website content to keep it fresh and relevant. This might mean keeping up with your current positioning, taking an SEO-heavy approach, or simply breathing new life into your existing content. As you dig in, start by removing outdated or irrelevant information; your products or services may have changed, and your industry may have evolved. And don’t forget about discoverability and readability, either. Organize the structure of your content (remember those subheadings we talked about?) and adjust for your target keywords. Is content leading nowhere? 404 no more. Check that both internal and external links still work, and ensure that they aren’t more than a few years old.
Neglecting key pieces can easily make your content efforts go sideways. When website content writing is at the top of your to-do list, make it about balance. Balance the elements on the page, the information you need to share, and your SEO needs. Here are some specific tips:
1. Don’t Forget High-Quality Visuals
Written content and imagery should always go hand in hand, each lifting the other up. Think about, for example, how frustrating it is when a restaurant menu doesn’t have pictures of the entrees. The same is true online. Readers want to connect the dots between your brand and what they’re reading—and sometimes an image can say more than your words.
Enhance your content with visually appealing and relevant: Images, graphics, Infographics and Videos.
Visuals should be professional and high-resolution and should add to your overall content, not distract from it. Make sure visuals complement your brand identity, and minimize the “cheese factor” by being a little choosy about stock photos.
2. Don't Overwhelm with Information
Your content should always be approachable and organized, so find a balance between incorporating the right information and creating a logical structure. Long chunks of information feel overwhelming to readers who already have waning attention spans, and it’s even harder on mobile devices. Break up walls of text with short sentences, paragraphs, and bullet points to get to the point quickly and maintain readers’ interest.
3. Don't Neglect SEO
Keyword stuffing hasn’t been OK for years, but you can integrate the right terms responsibly. Your best bet? Incorporate keywords organically throughout your content, prioritizing readability and grammar. Website content that speaks more to the search engines than to readers sounds forced and doesn’t read as credible or authentic—which can elevate bounce rates and hurt rankings in the long run. Choose one or two relevant keywords and use them naturally in the body and within on-page elements, including: Meta tags, Headings, URLs, Alt text
4. Don't Ignore Calls to Action (CTAs)
You know what you want your audience to do—but do they? By incorporating CTAs, you help them take the next step in their journey, whether that’s gathering more information or making a purchase. The CTAs you choose should offer something your audience wants based on their persona and stage of the buyer’s journey. Use action-oriented words to prompt engagement, such as: Download Your Copy Watch Now Also, consider where you want to use your CTAs. Some of the most effective positions on the page are in the sidebar, at the bottom of the page, and in-line via hyperlinked text (providing additional keyword opportunities).
5. Don't Copy or Use Duplicate Content
Always be original. That’s solid advice both for life and for website content writing. The content across your website and its marketing assets needs to be unique to provide maximum value for you and your audience. If it isn’t, there are real implications in terms of both SEO and plagiarism (something from high school English class you do still need to keep in mind). Did you get some amazing information from another source? Great! Just take the time to make sure you’re not copying the info word for word, and give credit where it’s due. Use direct quotes or link out to the source’s site (something to be increasingly mindful of when using AI!). Is similar information popping up across multiple pages on your website? Shake it up so search engines know you’re not trying to duplicate content to rank higher.
6. Don’t Let Page Loading Speed Lag
We’re far removed from the days of dial-up internet and sluggish browsing. If visitors have to wait for a page to load, you risk losing their attention—and elevating your bounce rates. Load times over two seconds increase the odds that users will leave by a whopping 32 percent. Get their eyes on your content by optimizing page loading speed in a few simple ways:
Optimize images by compressing them before uploading and reducing their size so they’ll appear on the page in a consistent manner.
- Clean up your code by removing unnecessary spaces and comments, as well as plug-ins and fonts that are no longer being used.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce the physical distance between the server and users.
7. Don't Be Self-Centered
There’s a difference between educational content and advertising copy. Although your site is a marketing tool, website content writing should focus on your audience's needs. Instead of solely promoting your business, take a more natural, slow-burn approach to pull visitors in than “Buy now!” People land on your website to learn. Don’t just insist that your products and solutions can answer their pain points; get into the why and how. Do you have employees with expert perspectives on industry-related topics? Leverage the website to share information, insights, and expertise—so consumers will think of you first when they need help.
Well-written website content can move audiences from casual information seekers to repeat customers. When you meet them where they are with content that gives them what they need and integrates best practices that position your website positively, both sides win.
Learn more about Sierra's partner, Smartbug Media.
Jen Spencer, CEO of SmartBug Media, has more than 20 years of marketing experience working within tech startups, publicly traded companies, mid-market organizations, and the not-for-profit space. She assists B2B organizations and B2C e-commerce businesses drive lead growth, revenue generation, and market awareness throughout the full customer lifecycle, leveraging comprehensive digital content, design, and web development solutions.