Whether potential customers click in directly from organic search results, click on an ad, or surf in via social media, your website is often their last stop before starting a relationship with your business. Your website is your flagship in a sense. Shouldn’t your content be worthy of that? It better be if you want to increase conversion rate metrics.
Website content should be engaging, attractive, relevant, and informative. Give it the attention it deserves by implementing these 10 content writing tips.
- Open With Something Powerful
Two of the most important metrics you can track are time on page and bounce rates. These are great indicators that your visitors are taking the time to read your content, or that something is turning them off almost immediately. The longer someone stays on your page, the better chance of them converting.
Open your content with something powerful to grab attention, and make visitors want more. Consider the following introduction:
“Welcome to ‘Email Marketing Deluxe’. We provide email marketing software and consulting services to small businesses around the world. Ten years ago, we opened our doors with the goal of helping companies create email marketing campaigns at any budget…”
That’s nearly an entire paragraph spent telling readers absolutely nothing. Chances are, if they surfed in, they already know the company does email marketing. Instead, it’s better to focus on why they should stay and explore more. Like this:
“We can help you triple your email marketing ROI in less than three months. We offer a unique, email marketing, campaign building tool that allows you to develop a customized campaign in just an hour or two. Even better, you can do it for less than 100 dollars.”
- Write For The Scanners
79% of people who visit websites scan rather than read. Write and format your website content for their benefit. Melanie Sovann, a writer at Studicus has some solid advice. She says, “I like to lead each section of content with a list of points. On their own, these should be powerful enough to push visitors towards converting. Those who want to read further, may also do that.”
Try that bulleted list trick. You can also use captions, headings, subheadings, and plenty of white space to help make your content easier to consume in a short amount of time.
- Make it Conversational
Keep in mind that this isn’t academic writing or journalism. Your content is a tool that you use to connect with your audience. Don’t overwhelm with jargon or technical terms. Don’t make things overly formal, and by all means don’t make it all about you.
Instead, write content that treats your audience like a close. Use a conversational tone. Use the words you and you to make readers feel as if you’re addressing them directly. Then, ask questions, and give them a clear way to send feedback.
Of course, writing engaging, natural content is challenging. Here are some tools and resources that will help:
- Hemingway: This tool helps you to write readable prose, and ditch any bad writing habits.
- Grab My Essay: A great professional editing and proofreading service.
- Grammarly: Automated spelling and grammar checking to avoid distracting readers with troublesome errors.
- TrustMyPaper: Another copywriting service to help you enrich your content offerings while also staying on top of your other tasks.
- Calmly Writer: Writing tools without the distractions. Allows you to create great copy in a relaxing writing environment.
- Use Great Images
Videos, high quality photographs and other images make your content more engaging. They help you to better communicate your message, and nudge customers through the sales funnel. Use visuals liberally in your content in order to make it more attractive to readers, boost SEO, and attract more traffic.
- Write With Confidence in Your Product
This is no place for false humility. Write as if you know that you offer the best products and services. Don’t be afraid to tout the value of your products, and to assert that you are a better alternative to your competitors. Your visitors are already interested. Your content should assure them that they are on the right track.
- Leave The Features For Your Product Pages
There’s an important difference between benefits and features. Your landing pages and web pages should focus on benefits. These describe what people will get by becoming your customer. For example, if you sell environmentally friendly cleaning products, you might articulate the benefits of it by saying, “Get a clean, fresh smelling home that you can feel great about. Use our products around children and animals with no worries.”
Your product descriptions are the best place to list your product features. For example:
- EPA Tested
- Certified Safe For Children And Animals
- Amazing Pine Scent
- Convenient 8 oz Concentrate
- Make Sure Your Web Copy Matches Your Ad Copy
Before they visit your website, a customer may have seen your ads, social media posts, and other content. It’s important to be consistent. When readers see discrepancies between the statements you make on your website, and elsewhere they can become suspicious. It also disrupts the continuity of your messaging. To avoid this, use the same phrases, writing voice, even fonts and colors across all of your content.
- Address Your Customer Personas
Writing is always better when you address you’re writing to a specific reader. Tailor your website content to your customer personas to make it personalized and relevant. You can serve up content based on customer profile information, stated preferences, location, demographics, and more. By doing this, you communicate that you care about each customer’s experience on your site.
- Be Brief
When you write for marketing purposes, you aren’t addressing an audience that wants to read through paragraph after paragraph of information. Save that for your blog. Instead, your audience should be able to read through and understand your website content in just a minute or two.
- Format For Readability (And Google)
Good SEO leads to better conversion rates. Two ways to accomplish that is by first formatting your content for readability by using bulleted lists, headings, visuals, and plenty of whitespace. Then, optimize your content for rich snippets. This will help you get better search rankings, and make your listings stand out.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to boost your website conversions. However, presenting your audience with great content is one of your better options. Use the tips above to create great content that boosts conversions.
Author Bio: Bridgette Hernandez is a passionate writer who is currently working on her first book. When she isn’t working as a contributing writer at BestEssayEducation and WoWGrade, In spite of only having completed her degree last year, she is already one of the more sought after content writers online.