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Whether you’re a start-up, an SME or a global conglomerate brand that operates internationally, a bullet-proof content marketing strategy is vital in driving your business forwards, both online and offline. 

More specifically, in the digital world, content marketing helps you attract new customers, provide solutions for existing ones, and acts as a one-way ticket to higher levels of website traffic and engagement from your audience. 

Having said that, a successful content marketing strategy is something that takes time and expertise to implement.

Here, you can find our top 14 website content tips and a web content writing guide – from individual articles to your entire strategy. This will ensure you maximise the return on investment across your website, social media and PR activity with a few simple tips that make all the difference. 

1. Set goals for your content strategy

Our first website content tip is setting specific goals to track your performance against. What’s the goal of your entire content marketing strategy? What’s the goal of a specific article you’re in the process of planning or creating? What impact do you want your content to have on your business?

When it comes to website content, not only do you need to set goals from your entire strategy, but every single article, page or guide you implement onto your website must also have a clear goal. 

Here are some examples: 

  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Improving organic rankings 
  • Driving customer enquiries 
  • Increasing sales 
  • Improving domain authority 

By understanding exactly what the content needs to achieve, and aligning everything with your goals, you have a clear plan for execution that makes all the difference on the end result. 

2. Analyse the competition

Prior to writing website copy or creating fresh content for your pages, by taking inspiration from those who are doing it well, you can implement certain aspects of competitor content into your existing strategy. That applies to both direct competitors and those who operate outside of your industry circle. 

Competitor analysis for your entire strategy: 

You can take inspiration for website content from your competitors both visually, and also technically, using tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush

  • Finding potential content topics to cover 
  • Finding content gaps to exploit 
  • Finding inspiration for different forms of content (eg: blogs, videos, webinars, infographics, ebooks) 
  • What’s working for your competition? (analysing traffic, rankings and behavioural metrics across tools)
  • Finding inspiration for on-site information hubs 

Keep your eyes peeled for an article that explains exactly how you can do this using the tools mentioned above. 

Competitor analysis on a page by page basis: 

Just as importantly, when it comes to creating a singular piece of content, there are a number of ways you can analyse the competition.

  • Style of content 
  • What information do they provide?
  • UX and CRO features for higher conversion rates 
  • Page designs and visual aesthetics 
  • Enticing CTAs
  • Introductory hooks 
  • Use of videos and imagery 
  • Much more! 

SEO and content marketing as a digital service has become a foundation for brands of all statures, growing in demand year after year. In many cases, the hard work’s been done for you, so work smart as well as hard and use your high ranking competition as an advantage to help you rise above them in organic search. 

3. Prioritise the end-user 

Google’s main tip for writing content: provide information that offers value. 

This sounds like an obvious statement when somebody’s looking at how to write content for a website. But it’s one that should never be overlooked in terms of giving the user exactly what they want. 

By identifying your ideal personas and ensuring that your content is perfectly catered for them, you can leave a much better impression when they land on your website. 

If your content isn’t focused on the end-user, you need to ask yourself, what’s the point? Creating content that isn’t focused on your ideal customer is like writing a letter with no name on it. 

Start asking yourself the following questions:

  • What will the user be looking for?
  • What information do I need to provide?
  • What will they expect when they hit the page? 
  • How can I keep them on the page for longer?
  • How can I ensure the information is easily digestible? 
  • How can I ensure the content is visually appealing? 

If you aren’t giving the user exactly what they are looking for when clicking through to the content you’re offering, the user won’t like it. 

If your users don’t like the information you are providing, I can guarantee search engines won’t either, and your time, energy and resources are being diluted as you’re falling at the first hurdle. 

4. Great content is more than just words 

When looking specifically at the creation of website content, great content is far more than just written copy. 

When looking at how to create website content, many people often think search engines such as Google will just crawl your amazing copy and boom… you’re at the top of the search results.

In reality, that’s not how it works. 

For the best effect, you need to bring pages to life in every way possible. That includes using: 

  • Enticing introductions 
  • Amazing imagery 
  • Valuable video content 
  • Aesthetic page designs 
  • Visually appealing content structures 
  • Easily digestible content 
  • Downloadable content 
  • Satisfying solutions and summaries 

The list goes on and on… get creative! 

Google has a specific algorithm named RankBrain that seeks to understand exactly how great the content that you’re offering is. By analysing click-through rate, bounce rate and dwell time, if users like what they see, Google will know this. 

If Google knows you’re providing great content, you will be rewarded with higher organic ranking positions and new sources of traffic. 

5. Provide value, expertise and solutions 

This leads perfectly into our website content tip. You need to provide value in every way possible. 

Let’s paint a picture. Is there anything worse than coming across a potential piece of interesting content and then being completely let down by what you find? 

Everyone has been subject to clicking in and out of search engine results pages as the content just isn’t what you were looking for. 

Think of the clickbait-y celebrity news headlines you often find yourself intrigued by on social media or other areas of the web. 

You see the headline, think “hmm… is that right?!” before opening the page to find a sh*tty news article that virtually twists words and is completely off the mark. Don’t be that website. 

Nobody likes lengthy pieces of content that consistently explain something with no solution. Provide value, provide expertise, and most importantly, provide a solution. 

Our ultimate website copy tip: identify, explain, elaborate, recommend. 

6. Keyword optimisation 

Keyword research and content optimisation is the ultimate foundation of SEO. Without it, your website is holding itself back as the keywords you’re appearing/want to appear for aren’t reaching their full potential. 

When creating content for your website, always ensure that you are naturally optimising your content with keywords that are relevant, including both short and long tail keywords. I’ve been doing that exact thing throughout this article, have you noticed? 

There are various different tools you can use to find keywords relevant for your website’s pages, including: 

For the lower two tools, there are endless opportunities for identifying new keywords, analysing competitors, and also benchmarking your current keyword performance. 

Once you have found your ideal keywords, whether creating new content or re-optimising existing pages, ensure they are naturally implemented into your content so you appear higher in the search results for that chosen term. 

Consider the keyword difficulty, search volume, and most importantly, the relevance to your business through the search intent of the user. 

7. SEO best practices 

Leading nicely into our next website content tip, ensure you follow SEO best practices! 

There are a number of SEO optimisations you must implement onto your website to be highly competitive in organic search: 

  • Optimised heading structures (H1s, H2s, H3s etc)
  • Page titles (the title presented in search results – focus on enticing clicks) 
  • Meta descriptions (powerful and punchy content snippet that summarises what the user can expect from your page) 
  • Alt-tags on images (clearly descriptive tags for improved UX and SEO) 
  • Internal linking (improves Google’s understanding of the important pages on your website)
  • Using tools to gain insight into performance 

By following the checklist above, you can ensure that the pages on your website stand the best possible chance at ranking higher in organic search. There are also a number of advanced techniques you can use for further optimisation, but this is a foolproof way to happier SEO. 

At Circulate, we use a nice analogy that perfectly represents how you should use your heading structures. That’s by comparing content heading structures to a book. 

Let us explain: your H1 would be your title, H2’s would be your chapters, and would be your H3’s subchapters. It’s really that simple. With a clear content structure, Google will have a clearer understanding of the information you are providing, ultimately helping you climb the ranks in organic search. 

8. Tone of voice 

Our eighth and potentially most interesting website copy tip: establishing your tone of voice. 

The simple definition of tone of voice is “the way a person speaks to someone”. 

When translating this to the world of online marketing, tone of voice relates to the way people feel when exposed to your content and written copy, alongside the messages the user subliminally feels beyond the information they are gathering.  

Whenever you’re creating content, you should first identify your tone of voice and the important values within it, and second, stick to it. 

By staying consistent, authentic, unique and honest, you can replicate how customers would feel when interacting with your brand in the flesh. This unearths a number of opportunities for your brand messaging such as focus, authority and clearer brand identity/values. 

Think, how do you want to be perceived? What are your company’s values? Then relate that to every single piece of content that hits your website, social media and beyond.

9. Write naturally 

Content tips 9 and 10 are highly relevant for written copy and act as a web content writing guide for those looking at how to write for their website. 

The first: write naturally! 

Gone are the days of endless keyword implementations and black-hat keyword stuffing. At one time, there were certain villains across the web that would simply change their font colour to that of their background, and type in their focus keywords until command, shift & v broke. 

Thankfully, search engines have become much cleverer, and today, that’s not the case. Search engines such as Google reward content that’s written naturally, that conveys expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T). 

So to those that think ranking on Google is just a case of adding keywords to a page, it isn’t. 

You’ll stand a better chance at ranking through a technically optimised site and content that naturally targets keywords whilst providing high levels of value, authority and expertise. 

10. Grammar, terminology and readability 

Of all of our content marketing tips, this one is arguably the most obvious one. For that reason, we’ll keep it short and sweet:

  • Ensure your grammar is inch-perfect
  • We’ll repeat: ensure your grammar is inch-perfect
  • Use appropriate and expert terminology 
  • Keep sentences shorter and to the point for improved readability 
  • Proof-read, proof-read, proof-read 

There’s nothing less professional than poor grammar and spelling mistakes, especially for those users with a good eye for great grammar and written content. If that applies to your customer base, this website content tip is arguably the most important for you. 

In addition, using terminology that conveys expertise instils trust into the users of your website, making all the difference in improving your conversion rate and encouraging key goals and actions across your pages. 

11. Keep it current 

By aligning your content strategy with trending topics, you can show that your brand is aligned with the modern world and what’s going on around us. These days, brands of all shapes and sizes need to be trendy, and this is a foolproof way of doing so. 

By using tools such as Google Trends, you can analyse the popularity of top search queries in Google across different countries and languages. The website uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time, making it easy to report, share and use data to your advantage.

You can then mould appropriate topics that are relevant to the products/services you offer into your content strategy. 

When executed correctly, this can potentially unlock the following: 

  • Improved shareability on social media 
  • Higher levels of demand and engagement 
  • Potential for content to go viral 
  • Staying ahead of the curve 
  • Making the most of higher search volumes 
  • Interest from other sources

12. Use PR to broaden your reach 

Leading perfectly into our twelfth website content tip. It’s not just your customers that may be interested in the content you have to offer.

Other domains and establishments across the web may also take an interest in your content if it’s relevant, up to date and on-trend. 

There are also a number of PR tactics you can use to improve the reach of your content, including:  

  • Building relationships with journalists and bloggers 
  • Sponsorships 
  • Outreach & press releases 
  • Guest posts 
  • Content collaborations 
  • Monitor and reacting to media enquiries across social media channels and tools 

PS: for any PR related activity, always, always, always aim to get a backlink with descriptive anchor text based on who you are, or even better, what you do. This will help improve the domain authority of your website, a key ranking factor in organic search. 

13. Measure performance 

To accurately understand exactly how your content is performing, you need to measure the performance. That applies to both how users are interacting with your content, and also, ways in which you can improve the organic visibility of your content in search engines such as Google. 

Google Analytics 

First up, Google Analytics is the perfect tool for understanding behavioural metrics such as:

  • Page views
  • New users
  • Avg time on page
  • Entrances
  • Bounce rate
  • Exit rate 
  • Page value 
  • Conversions 
  • Pages per session 
  • Behaviour flows 
  • & more! 

This data helps you understand the pages users are interacting with, the time they are spending, how engaged they are in the content and how valuable it is to your business. 

From there, you can put forward solutions to ensure your content is performing at its absolute best. Once you have made optimisations, you can accurately outline the impact certain improvements have had on your content’s performance.

Such learnings help content experts mould their content strategy as they understand what works, and just as importantly, what doesn’t. 

Google Search Console 

In terms of organic search, Google Search Console will help you understand how well your content is performing across a number of factors such as clicks, impressions, average position and also click through rate. 

This will help you find new ways to improve your website’s SEO & content marketing performance. 

To specifically break down performance across high performing keywords, pages, and more, you can also filter your content performance across the following: 

  • Date ranges 
  • Queries 
  • Pages
  • Countries
  • Devices
  • Search appearance 
  • Search types
  • & more 

HotJar

For a visual understanding of how content is performing, you can also use HotJar, a visual analytics tool that allows you to view exactly what users are doing across your website. 

14. Re-optimise 

Our final content marketing tip that links perfectly to the point above – always look to re-optimise your content by auditing performance across the board. You can do so across a range of tools, particularly Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This applies to blog articles, landing pages and more. 

By understanding the performance, you can fast-track your way to even better results. Look for the following: 

  • Is the content ranking well in organic search? 
  • Can you get to even higher positions for specific keywords? 
  • How are people interacting with the content? 
  • Can behavioural metrics be improved in Google Analytics? 
  • Is there additional information you should include? 
  • Do you have any additional imagery or video content that can be included within the post? 
  • Does the metadata need re-optimising to improve CTR? 

If you can see there are fruitful opportunities in terms of improving the content you already have, this can ensure you’re competing with the competition that regularly updates their website – we guarantee that the best ones will be doing so. 

As organic search is highly competitive, revisiting content and re-optimising based on a number of different factors can help you attract more traffic, and just as importantly, improve the experience for those already finding you. 

Let’s build your dream content marketing strategy! 

If you’re currently sick of seeing your competitors outshine you across search results and social media, you know who to call. 

Our team of SEO gurus and expert copywriters are your dedicated partner to help build your dream content marketing strategy from the ground up, ensuring you can find new customers and strengthen relationships with current ones. 

Specialising in all aspects of digital marketing, we offer a range of services across SEO, PPC and Paid Social that are here to grow your business. Contact one of our experts today for more information and we’ll be happy to help. 

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