How to Improve Website Content and Bring It Back to Life
Imagine this situation:
You review your site analytics. You’re getting traffic but it’s not converting into leads and paying customers.
You might have a good search engine optimization strategy in place. But your bounce rate is high. When visitors reach your website, they leave quickly without subscribing to your mailing list or purchasing your products and services. What’s wrong?
The problem could be your website content.
It’s your website content that engages potential customers. But writing great web content that converts leads into customers is an art and a science that contains a series of steps.
In this post, you’ll discover the essential steps needed to improve your website content so your website drives customers to your inbox and shopping cart, not to your competitor’s website.
Follow these website content tips to bring your website content back to life.
How to Improve Your Website Content
With these 11 website content tips, you’ll take your website content from mundane to magnificent.
Step 1 – Do a Content Audit
Performing a content audit will show you what you’re working with. It will let you know where you need to add or remove content and discover any gaps.
Jot down your page titles and descriptions of what content is on each page.
Doing this will enable you to see what pages may need more or less content so you can make revisions and fill in any gaps where important content may be missing.
Step 2 – Revive Old Content
Keeping your website up-to-date and keeping your content up-to-date will attract and keep visitors on your company website and lead them to convert.
On the other hand, if people see outdated content on your website, they will want to leave. Some of the information becomes irrelevant when it’s outdated, especially when it’s really old.
You can always rewrite a good blog post with a new spin on it. Use new headings, a new introduction, and conclusion — maybe even do some editing.
You can also do a follow up to a topic that is still relevant. To attract a wider audience, write about hot topics currently in the news.
Posting new content on your website also establishes your company website’s authority with Google and helps to improve search engine ranking.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when reviving old content:
- Identify which posts to revitalize: You won’t want to rewrite every post. Choose the blog posts that are still relevant to your audience and get rid of the posts dragging you down. To determine which blogs to keep, you might way to consider: Social shares, keyword ranking, page views and content shares.
- Keep the same URL: You will want to keep the same URL. If you do change it or remove the blog all together, don’t forget to do a proper 301 redirect.
- Update your call to action: A new CTA is a good way to change up your content and see if a new message leads users to a conversion.
- Promote your old downloadable content on new content: Revive it with new images, guides, and graphs.
- Promote Your Content: After you revive your content, it’s time to promote it. Post and publish it on your social media pages and email your posts to your subscribers
Step 3 – Keep Your Content Organized
There’s nothing more frustrating for a web visitor than reading disorganized content.
You may have valuable information available to readers, but if it’s not organized, they’ll never be able to find it. A way to improve your website content is to make it easier to navigate.
A great way to achieve this is with catchy headers. Headers help you break up your content so visitors can find information more easily.
Other strategies include using:
- Numbered lists
- Bullet points
- Charts
- Tables
- Graphics
These techniques not only break up content, but they also help you simplify complex subjects and highlight particular points of interest.
Step 4 – Make Your Content Scannable
The majority of web visitors never read every single word. They scan web pages until they find the information they’re searching for. The biggest deterrent is dense content in long paragraphs.
Consider bolding or italicizing important points, indenting bullet points and numbered lists, grabbing some pull quotes for emphasis. These strategies will make your content gentler on the eyes and easier for the reader to scan.
These techniques make content more user-friendly and improve the user experience. It makes the words of your company more engaging, thoughtful and interesting.
Step 5 – Improve Website Content with Short Sentences and Paragraphs
The internet isn’t the place to sound pedantic and impress people with long sentences and your knowledge of vocabulary.
Long blocks of texts intimidate readers. It makes people work too hard and it’s difficult to comprehend. This is one of the reasons newspapers and magazines use short blocks of texts posted in columns.
Keep your sentences and paragraphs brief and to the point. Don’t make sentences and paragraphs long and drawn out.
That may work in a novel, but remember, people who read online are usually looking for information to solve a problem.
Use bite-sized chunks with clear headlines when writing product pages. This will help visitors recognize features and topics important to them.
Page Length
Pages too short can appear skimpy. They lack topic depth and won’t provide enough information for visitors to comprehend a subject. They also can work against a website for site rank.
On the other hand, if a page is too lengthy, your content appears long winded to your website visitors. This can motivate prospects to want to leave your site, raising page bounce rates.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your web content between 750 and 1,000 words in length for service pages and between 1,700 and 2,000 for blog posts. If you need more room, you can break long topics into several pages.
If a page is too short, consider merging it with another page or adding more headings and paragraphs to lengthen and improve website content on that page.
Step 6 – Write in a Conversational Tone
When you’re writing for the web, it’s important to speak in a natural, conversational tone.
Know who you are speaking with and think of what matters to them. Writing for the digital space is much different than writing a formal report.
Your words need to engage them naturally similar to the way you would speak with them if you were meeting with them in person.
Step 7 – Remove Industry Jargon
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with their website content is to litter it with industry jargon.
Most readers will skip over technical jargon in search of a language they can understand. This even works better when you’re writing to a business-to-business audience.
Instead of using industry jargon, use everyday language that communicates trust in your brand. This will make your company more approachable.
When readers can’t comprehend what you’re communicating, they’ll leave your company website to find shelter with a competitor’s website written in a language they can understand.
Pro-Tip: Save industry jargon for blog posts. While you want to keep service and information pages jargon free, your blog is a great place to show your industry knowledge inside and out.
Step 8 – Cut Fluff
When it comes to content, provide your reader with only the information they need. As the famous author, William Strunk puts it:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
When writing website content, omit flowery modifiers and omit needless words. Be concise, direct and make every word count. Use the active voice versus passive language to make your writing more energetic.
After you write your content, we recommend using the readability feature of the YOAST plug-in to discover passive language and needless words.
Step 9 – Be a Problem Solver
Most visitors searching online are looking to solve problems. For example, someone searching for a dentist is looking to fill a cavity.
Someone searching for a software application could be looking to find a technical solution to organize their time or get tasks done more quickly.
To improve website content, write it in a way that it solves a reader’s problem.
Whether someone needs guidance on how to get more traffic to their website or a new dress for an occasion because they have nothing to wear, they’re looking for a solution to a problem.
Step 10 – Tell a story
Who doesn’t like a good story?
Storytelling provides a great way to make your website content more engaging. Using anecdotes and stories make your company, products, and services more compelling to your readers. It helps you connect with them.
Whether you use a customer testimonial to convey how your product improved their life. Or tell a story about how you started your business. Stories engage readers and help convert them into qualified sales leads.
Step 11 – Use Images to Break Up Content
Images provide an effective way to add value to your website content. They break up text, add interest and color.
Many websites are missing quality images to help the web visitor separate long text and engage with the company’s message and absorb their content.
Images also provide an efficient way to condense complex information. That’s why infographics have gained so much popularity. It’s a super way to combine data with text in one smart package.
Images you can use include:
- Photographs
- Charts
- Graphs
- Boxes
- Callouts
- And more!
Make sure you own the images you use. If you don’t own images, you can find inexpensive-or even free– stock images on stock photography websites.
Pro-Tip: Our favorite places to find free images are Unsplash and Pexels.
Final Thoughts on How to Improve Website Content
Now you know 11 expert strategies that improve website content. Incorporate these website content tips and techniques. Promote your new and improved content. Then watch your company’s revenue soar.
