Producing great quality content for your website is crucial to your success. Why does the content matter? Quality content is an important way to stand out from the crowd of all the other sites out there and give your readers something that will hook them and keep them coming back for more.
Here are some handy tips for achieving the best quality content writing.
Know Your Audience
Producing truly great content starts before you even write your first word. Because to write content that will wow your readers, you first need to know who they are. What are their interests? What has likely brought them to your site?
Knowledge is power and knowing your audience will allow you to tailor your content especially for them. This will ensure it is relevant and powerful.
Start With a Bang
Your opening sentences need to grab your reader’s attention. Quickly and firmly. If you can’t impress them right away, it is likely they will make their way to another site without reading any further. You need to start with a bang, get them interested, and make them excited to read the rest of your content. The most important information should come first, with less critical content coming later.
Keep Sentences Short
Great content is readable and engaging. To achieve this, you should keep your sentences short and simple. Long sentences can become confusing, distracting, and can even lose your key message. Keep sentences short and punchy, and people will be far more likely to keep reading and stay engaged. This is important, since it is only by reading to the end of a post that they will get all the key messages you want to convey.
Be Descriptive and Clear
You need to be clear what it is that you do or can offer. Why should people visit your site? Why should they remain on your site? And why should they come back for more? You cannot be vague. The best content is perfectly clear in its messaging, describing explicitly what service or product you can provide. You must include the information on that service or product that is most relevant to your audience. For content to be truly outstanding, your readers should be left with very few questions about your service or product by the time they are finished absorbing your content.
Avoid Jargon
Jargon is a common trap in many industries. We all use it—often without thinking. But when writing your content, jargon should absolutely be avoided. While you may know your audience and may believe they will understand any special terminology you use, assumptions like this are a big mistake.
Not everyone will understand what you mean. And in the online world, your goal should be to attract as many readers as possible. You want to attract a wide audience, to ensure the success and longevity of your site. Jargon will shrink your audience and potentially frustrate and confuse people.
Write in an Active Voice
Writing has a lot of elements. But at its core, there are two main styles, or “voices.” Active and passive. Both have their place in the writing world, but, when it comes to content, always choose the active voice. For example:
“You can do it” is the active version of the passive, “It can be done.”
You can see here how the active voice versus the passive is instantly more readable and engaging. It spells out the message clearly and concisely.
Make It Easy to Skim
With so many pages and so much information on the Internet, you want to make life easy for your readers. Very few people will open a web page and be prepared to read and digest a thick wall of text. You need to give people the ability to scan and skim, to see if the topic they are searching for will be covered by your page.
This can be achieved by breaking the content into smaller, more digestible sections. The use of headings and subheadings, as well as bullet points, are the easiest ways to do this. It will help your content pop, and people will be far more likely to stick around and keep reading.
Use a Thesaurus
Repetition is boring. Nobody enjoys reading content that sounds like the same thing over and over. But sometimes you may find yourself feeling a need to repeat certain words. While the use of keywords is, of course, important, keyword stuffing, or using them excessively, will harm your content. It makes your information a chore to read, which, in turn, makes people stop reading. If that happens, they may never return to your site.
The thesaurus is your friend. It will help you find substitute words and avoid repetition. And it will not harm your keyword count, as similar words will contribute toward achieving a high score. Most importantly, the use of similar words, instead of the same words, makes your content far more readable.
Layer Your Pages
One of the lesser known, but more powerful ways of strengthening your content is to layer your pages. This is achieved by including links to other pages within your content. It makes it far easier for people to navigate your site and find exactly what they are looking for.
The key here is to ensure that links are relevant. The last thing you want to do is lead people astray. Including highly relevant and helpful links to other pages on your site makes your content far stronger and even more engaging.
End With Action
Last, but absolutely by no means least, is ending each page with a call to action. What do you want your audience to do next? Contact you? Search other pages on your site for more information?
Calling your readers to action should be the standard sign off to guide them toward the next action you would like them to take. And it makes people feel as if the content they have just read has a clear purpose. If you’re looking for help with quality content writing, hiring a freelance content writer is a good choice. Learn more about how much to pay content writers.
