Content has become an essential part of our daily lives. Every few minutes here and there, we consume content in one way or another. Content becomes even more crucial if you are running a website, be it an online store or a blog.
But honestly, writing good website content is challenging. From lacking heading ideas to running short of words — it’s difficult.
With all of these problems, the quality of content is difficult to maintain.
That’s why I have spent hours researching and creating this piece of content to figure out how to write impactful and engaging content.
I will share 9 important tips with you so that you can maximize the outcome of your website content. Not only will these tips help you improve your writing quality, but also help you rank online.
1. Define your Goal
The first thing you should focus on is the essence of your writing. You need to have a clear goal and know why you are writing a piece of content. To get started, you can ask yourself the following questions:
1. What is the intent of your content?
- Are you trying to inform the users?
- Are you trying to entertain the users?
- Or are you trying to convince them?
Answering this question will define the “intent” behind your content and allow you to adapt the appropriate writing style.
2. What action do you want from the user?
- Do you want the user to read the article?
- Do you want the user to click on a URL?
- Do you want the user to sign up for an account?
This will help you understand what actions an average user should take and allow you to place call-to-action phrases to persuade them.
3. How do you want your content to help you?
- Do you want to bring more traffic to your site?
- Do you want to establish or increase your topical authority?
- Do you want to establish your brand authority?
- Or all of these?
These questions are crucial to writing impactful and engaging website content. By answering these questions, you will be able to map out the roadmap to success.
2. Write Simply
Complex terms, wordy sentences, undefined acronyms, never-ending introductions, and whatnot — all of these things are needless and make the content difficult to comprehend. If you want users to stick to your website content, you have to make it easy for them to consume.
To do that, write in your own words and avoid fancy terms added just for the sake of fanciness. Another thing you can do is simplify the conceptual parts of your content for the audience.
Here are some additional tips:
- Break long sentences into shorter ones.
- Discuss one topic per paragraph.
- Keep the paragraphs short. Two lines per individual paragraph are ideal. Exceptions are acceptable if needed.
- Reduce the use of adverbs.
- Avoid acronyms if possible. If you use an acronym, write its full form within parentheses “()” at least once in your content.
- Break the concepts into parts.
- Use bullet points when giving quick instructions.
- Do not underline text for no reason. Users may confuse the underlined text with a link.
After following these tips, you’ll start to see a difference. Simplicity in writing helps users understand better and can help you leave a strong impression on their minds if they find your content helpful.
3. Use Active Voice
When it comes to website content writing, using active voice rather than passive voice is one of the recommended practices to make your content user-friendly and easy to understand.
Instead of saying, “The house was borrowed by John.” You can say, “John borrowed the house.” The former is wordy and can increase the overall complexity of the content as compared to the latter which is simpler.
4. Make Headings Short & Descriptive
Headings are used to let the user know what the next part of your content is about.
But a poorly written heading can do the opposite and confuse the user. Such headings are vague, wordy, and often long. They fail to indicate what the next part of the content is about.
So, the best way to write headings is by keeping them short.
For example, The heading “Make sure headings are short and indicative of the topic” can be written as “Make headings short & descriptive.”
The rules are not set in stone, though. Sometimes, a longer heading may work better than a shorter one such as the one with more context.
Take, for example, the heading “Apple jam sales worldwide in 2024” is much more contextual as compared to “Apple jam sales.” Even though the latter is shorter and simpler, it lacks context and is confusing.
That’s why you have to strike a balance between a short and descriptive heading by making it as short as possible while also specifying the context to guide the user.
5. Use the Inverted Pyramid Structure
The Inverted Pyramid is a writing structure in which the most important part of the information is written first.
Putting the most important information on top of your content is not only helpful for the user but also helps captivate them into reading further.
On average, most users only stay for a while to read your content. And it is in this small amount of time that you have to convince the users you have what they are looking for.
So, make sure to hook the reader right from the beginning to maximize the engagement.
6. Format the Website Content Properly
Do not over-format your content or it will look ugly. The unnecessary usage of bold, underline, italics and indentations add to the complexity of the content.
Use the formatting options like bold and italics sparingly, only to highlight something important. Another thing you can do is reduce the headings if possible by combining the relevant parts of the content into one.
It’ll give your website content a neat and tidy look and make it easier to consume.
7. Optimize for SEO
SEO is vital for increasing your website content’s impact and engagement. Always do your keyword research before you start writing.
Find all kinds of relevant keywords; long-tail, short-tail, LSI’s, and insert them in your content adequately. Not too much to do keyword-stuffing, just enough to optimize the content.
Do your research and see what the competitors are doing. See which keywords they are using, and what aspects of the content they’re covering.
Competitor analysis will help you find out new ways, keywords, and ideas that you otherwise may miss, like a nice potential heading.
8. Add Links
Links are helpful not only for the users but your SEO as well. Instead of just mentioning someone’s name, link to their social media profile or website.
Take every opportunity to link to sources, resources, and relevant pages of other websites or of your own website so that users don’t have to go and manually search for something and then get lost finding it.
Internal linking, when done correctly, can boost your site’s engagement.
9. Add Visuals
Google considers visuals very helpful so it tends to rank the pages higher that use them. Visuals, such as videos, charts, infographics, screenshots, etc. can help a user understand something that they may struggle to understand by reading.
Research has established that our visual memory is much more powerful than our verbal memory. This is why people remember visuals longer and way better than they remember words.
Moreover, a short comprehensive video can convey so much information in one instance compared to the written content.
For example, a video that demonstrates how to play a specific video game is going to be much more informative and easy to comprehend than a piece of text.
Otherwise, a reader may struggle to make sense of what the writer is trying to convey about the gameplay if the concept is very complex.
So, adding visuals can help people consume the website content more efficiently, increasing engagement and its impact.
Final Words
Remember, writing serves a purpose. And that purpose must be prioritized above all. Everything else is secondary.
However, refining and fine-tuning the website content is a part of making it easy for your audience to engage and benefit from it.
So don’t rush, and take your sweet time to research the topic before you write about it. Then do all you can to improve it; simplify it, make it error-free, rephrase it, restructure it, optimize it, and go all in to maximize its impact and engagement.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
