There’s a world of difference between website content that simply informs, and website content that’s polished, concise, clear, and engaging. First off, let’s define what website content is: essentially, web content is any written, audio, or visual content element that appears on a website. Those creative elements can include anything from blog posts, marketing copy and photos, to logos, embedded videos, and podcasts.
Website content is very flexible, and can be an amalgam of many mediums. A single blog post may feature text, interspersed with images and audio options, for example. The point is, website content is dynamic, fluid, adaptable, compelling, and consistent. It must flow well, have excellent readability, and above all, it must convince the reader to take some kind of action.
There are many characteristics that form the foundation of good website content.
8 Qualities of Strong Website Content
Robust website content not only provides value to readers, it promotes your brand. In order to achieve all that, it has to be engaging, clear, and tailored to your target audiences. Unless it offers some kind of value to the reader, it’s not going to land well. Check out the eight qualities of strong website content. Your content should be:
- Clear: Clarity is priority #1. Confusing content not only frustrates your readers, but also discourages further engagement with your website.
- Polished: Increase trust with polished, clean, and grammatically-correct content; the fastest way to decrease trust is to have a website riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.
- Digestible: Your content should be geared toward easy consumption on all digital platforms. Most people will just skim content, so be sure to break up walls of text with eye-catching headers, bulleted lists, and short, concise paragraphs to offer the best value to readers who simply don’t have time to read it all.
- Valuable: Good content delivers value in some form, whether educational or entertaining in nature. Whereas educational content gives the reader a new piece of information they did not have previously, entertaining content moves or delights them in some meaningful way.
- Readable: For readers to continue to interact with your site, the content they find there must be easy to understand. The readability of your content is fueled by several factors, such as terminology, use of jargon, spelling and grammar, sentence structure, and more. You can improve content readability by using plain language, short sentences, and clear instructions. Most experts say to keep your content geared to an eighth-grade reading level.
- Scannable: In order for content to be readable, it must be scannable. This can be achieved with short paragraphs, lists and tables, attention-grabbing headlines, and high-quality photos.
- Consistent: The plain truth is that inconsistencies will confuse your readers. They also impact yourbrand recognition. Make sure your key messages, company name, and product names appear consistently throughout your content to build trust and engagement.
- Engaging: If you want to have any hope ofbuilding relationships with your customers, you have to create an emotional connection with them – and that starts with your content. In fact, emotional content performs almost twice as well as purely factual content. Write with emotive language and foster that connection with readers.
Contact Detroit Internet Marketing
Don’t have the time, patience, or skill to ensure strong website content for your business? Let the professional copy writers at Detroit Internet Marketing show you how good writing can make all the difference in your online presence. Schedule an appointment with us today to get started at (248) 234-4830.
