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As a startup, you would have read my earlier post about the basic potent digital marketing tips to be implemented in your business. Missed? Read it here, “Digital Marketing Tips to grow your startup”, I know it was just an outline, so I would like to elaborate more on each tip. This one is an absolute guide to write website content in order to drive more traffic to your business, the tools and techniques shall be used to keep your writing the better, and few other important factors should be considered while writing the content.

Synopsis:

1. Definition and Meaning
2. Why it so important
3. Few factors to be considered
4. Target Audience
5. Stages of Buyers Journey
6. Web content Writing tools and techniques
7. Final Takeaways

Let me start with Definition and Meaning:

Creating Creative and relevant content for your website is the most important step because people look at your webpage first before using your product or service. Below are the few definitions for your better understanding.

According to Great Content - Content writing is defined as  

“Content writing is a form of online writing which is closely linked to web marketing campaigns. This means creating the writing which appears on websites that are designed to sell or promote a specific product”

“Content writing is almost always related to Search Engine Marketing campaigns. It will involve writing tightly focused texts that include a set of keywords or phrases that have been researched by marketers. High-quality content will ensure that these keywords appear in the right density. The text will also be fluently written, clear and able to promote the product being described”

So do you really understand the real meaning of Content Writing? Good for you. Though I am putting in layman terms for all those beginners to understand in a better way.

Keep these in mind while writing your website content. In the frontend, you are writing it for your target audiences and in the backend, you are writing it (with best SEO tactics) for search engine spider so they can able to crawl and index your website in order to bring your page into the top search engine result page.

The above words could somehow answer the question of why content writing is so important? To be friendly with google algorithm, the quality of the content must be good. Say, if you feel my content here is not so relevant and useful to you or your business, you might not stay here (page) for a long time. So here comes the dwell time - meaning -

“dwell time is the amount of time that elapses between a user clicks on videos search result and return back to the SERPs (search engine result pages)”

Click here to read more about the above article.

To be precise, the longer the people stay on your webpage the more the dwell time is. There are many factors that can affect the dwell time, like

• Web Page loading speed

• Quality and relevance of the content you write

• Quality of presentation (formatting - with infographics, videos, and few interesting things)

• Length of the content (longer the content  more the stay)

Before you start writing your content you might have to keep all these factors in mind. But all those will take the second place, the primary one would be your audience.

Content for your Audience:

Because the right and relevant content will always drive more traffic to your website, the more traffic leads to more revenue. Before we step ahead we should be aware of the stages of the buyer's journey, there are 3 stages in our buyer's journey, the same strategy would not work for all the 3 stages. So the content you write should be relevant for all the 3 stages.

Source: Hubspot

Know about your customer's journey and write/ market your content/product/service accordingly. Try to imagine the customer journey with your day to day happenings.

Write your Content according to the above stages, make your content/ product description is understandable by the people who are in the awareness stage, which mean they are new to your brand, they came to know about your product for the first time. Here comes the Awareness stage content strategy, we will have to educate the visitors with our interesting facts, feedbacks, stories with emotional connect so they will want to know more about our products/service.

Source: Optimonster

At this stage, people will look for things like solutions to their problems, answers to their questions. So your content should be like educating them, inspiring them, which can bring them to the next stage of consideration. (Blog posts, stories can help you to success the awareness stage)

People do heavy research on their consideration stage to know whether your products provide value for the money, best out of all, the rating and reviews, and feedbacks. So make sure you provide all these pieces of stuff with your content so that buyers can consider buying your product. People would like to buy your product or service at this stage which means it is not 100% sure that they will buy. Even if you fail to turn them as a customer, be happy that you generated a lead. Yes, people who quite at consideration stage will become a lead for your business, you can put them into a separate segment called remarketing segment and implement remarketing campaigns to turn them into buyers.

At the Decision stage, the buyers are ready to buy your product. But Still, they have not made the purchase, (they may flip the consideration anytime) it is your responsibility to make the purchase happen. So what type of actions that can ease this stage?

Source: Hubspot

Here they are: Call To Action Buttons, Discount coupons, Free trial, Downloads, Test Drive, Free Demo (think about your business and write the best CTA you can offer for your customers). All these can make the visitors to trial with your product once if they feel satisfied they are going to become your loyal customers. 

Look at this Google’s Research on Micro Moments. Also, consider the buyer's persona while writing the content.

So no we have a basic idea about the factors that should be considered while writing content (the frontend one) but how about the backend one which I mentioned earlier. write your content with best SEO tactics so the search engine robots can crawl and index your website to bring it to the top search engine results page.

Look at the below basic tools for the betterment in content writing for your website:

• Be Grammarly

• SEO & Keyword Finder tools

• Stock Photography websites

• Platforms that help to generator content ideas.

Be Grammarly:

Make sure your content is free from typo errors and grammar mistakes. The following would be some of the freemium tools I would recommend.

Grammarly is one of the best freemium tools to stay away from grammar mistake

Hemingway is another online editing tool which is popular among writers and bloggers.  

Keyword tools:

As I mentioned earlier, your content should have the right density of keywords in order to rank better in search engine result page. The following are tools which can help us on keyword research.

Wordstreams Keyword Research tool will help you to get the list of keywords.

Also, try the following tools:  Answer the public, KWfinder.

SEO Tool:

If you are using WordPress do install Yost SEO Plugin.

Yoast SEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin since 2008. It is the favorite tool of millions of users, ranging from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet. With Yoast SEO, you get a solid toolset that helps you aim for that number one spot in the search results. Source Wordpress.org

Google Products:

• You want to be found on the web, Google’s Search Console will help. Learn how search console works and implement on your website.
• Google Trends and Keyword Planner: 

Google Trends is a search trends feature that shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google’s search engine relative to the site’s total search volume over a given period of time. Google Trends can be used for comparative keyword research and to discover event-triggered spikes in keyword search volume  Source : Wordstream

You will know the trending topics, products, and queries with this tool. Implement those insights for SEO betterment.

Google Keyword Planner is  Google Ads tool which will be used in Google Search Ad campaigns, but in the other end this tool will help you in knowing the best performing and competitive keywords in your industry, so you can use those while writing your content.

• Google Analytics is a tool which tracks and gives you the data and user behavior on your website. To give you an idea let me tell you what kind of insights you will get. You will know where your best visitors are located (Audience - Geo Report), Know what people are searching for on your site (Real Time Reports). A visualization report on what people click on the most, best and worst performing page (Behaviour Report). User Engagement (Behaviour - Engagement Report). With these insights, you can re-correct the flaws and utilize the best performing one to generate more revenue.

Other SEO Tools: Apart from Google products, there are lot many free, freemium, and premium tools which can be utilized. Check out MOZ, Ahref, SEMRush, and Ubersuggest.

Stock Photography websites:

Visit these websites which provide free, high-resolution images you can use in your website

• Unplash

• Pexels   

• Pixabay

• Shutterstock

Platforms that help to generator content ideas:
Quora: Participate in answering people's questions in a platform like Quora. Read the topics related to your industry, here people ask lots of questions, keep those questions in mind and develop your content/product/service so it can answer those questions.

Not only quora, but there are also a lot many platforms which will help you to generate content/topics ideas.

Select the platform which is related to your industry. Following are the few existing platforms

• Ask Reddit

• AskOpinion

• Yahoo Answers

• StackExchange

• Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Question

Few More:

• Listen to Podcasts related to your business, and industry. Learn what the pros are telling. Like, if you are running an event planning business, follow Endless Events and listen to their latest podcasts so you can fill the gaps you are missing.

• Signup for newsletters and latest updates from the products, platform which you are using. Even you can implement this with your competitors to know about their latest outcomes. Example, being a social media marker I signed up for Facebook IQ. Now I can keep myself updated with the latest insights happening in the world. Be it related to or not related to my business.

Final Takeaways:

Know the difference between content writing and copywriting.

• “The great distinction between content writing and copywriting lies in the purpose of writing it. Copywriting means writing for the sake of promotional advertising or marketing. The purpose of content writing is to entertain the online audiences so they stay longer on websites and engage with the brand” - Search Engine Journal.

• As an entrepreneur, you will implement content writing on your website pages, product description and so on, and you will implement copywriting when you run Advertising Campaigns and reaching the customer touch points (conveying your customers about your new product launch, discounts, and offers, email marketing campaigns, banners, and brochures, etc)

Strategy Differs for Homepage, About Us and Blog Contents:

• Home Page gives the first impression towards your business when people arrive on your website, so creating killer homepage content plays a vital role here. The basic important things to consider while drawing the homepage content are

Headline, Subheadline,Primary and Secondary Call to Action buttons, Including an impressive image or Video.

Source: IBM

• About Us page gives you an opportunity to create awareness about you and your brand to the visitors. Write a story that creates an emotional connection between you and the visitor. Look at MOZ’s About section for your better understanding. If you can create the awesome content in your homepage, there are chances of visitor becomes a lead.
• Posting contents about trending topic into your blog will help you to educate your audience and answer their questions. Blogging is writing interesting and actionable content on a regular basis. Try posting interesting content on happening topics within your industry to increase the audience engagement level.

Say NO

• Copying the existing content (duplicating the content) is unethical. If we try to steal the content from some other source is not a legal one and Google will penalize such activity.

Common mistakes we do:

• Having minimal content - write large content to keep up your dwell time.

• Neglecting typos.

So now you have a basic idea about how to write website content. You have written an excellent content for your website, how are you going to promote/market it? Wait for my next post about "Content Marketing Strategy" :)

Happy Writing!