6 Rules for How to Write Engaging Website Content

Every great marketing campaign needs to be supported by a strong website. Great websites are a combination of elegant design, an easy user experience, and clear online content writing.

Driving traffic to your website will only make a minimal impact if the website isn’t engaging to users. The primary function of a website is to educate users and encourage them to take a specific action. This post includes tips on how to write website content that will engage your users.

6 Rules for How to Write Engaging Website Content

Know your audience

In order to write compelling website content, you need to know who your audience is. Be sure to research your audience and know what’s important to them, how your product or service relates to a need of theirs, and their preferred style of communication.

Use this knowledge to write content that will resonate with your ideal audience. If users enter a website that has targeted, relevant content, they are more likely to take the next step such as submitting a form or making a purchase

Pique interest

Creative content writing is the best way to grab the attention of your users. Prompting them with a question to pull them in is a great strategy. The copy on each page of your site should be fun to read and should clearly demonstrate the benefits of what you provide.

While structuring the page and including keywords that are relevant to your audience is important for SEO strategy, this needs to be balanced with making the content engaging and exciting so that it resonates with your audience. Don’t feel the need to fluff it up just for entertainment value, though. Clear and concise is always better than trying to be clever just for the sake of it.

Encourage an action

Prompt users to take a specific action on the website. Is the goal for them to book an appointment? Purchase a product? Learn more about a topic?

Create a call to action that is short, succinct, and visually enticing. That way the user knows which action to take next after arriving on the page. If this next step isn’t clear, they will likely leave the page or site without completing the action. Keep possible actions to a minimum. Too many options can stall users from doing anything at all.

Be the authority

Strive to be the thought leader in your vertical. Write copy that provides unique insight and expertise in your industry. The content on your website can help foster trust with your audience.

Content marketing strategies aren’t just about bringing in immediate sales. Users today want to feel empowered and supported by educating themselves. Building confidence in your business over time by providing valuable information increases brand awareness and makes you the company users will turn to when in need of your product or services.

Don’t overload

Page copy should be easy to scan. This can be done by organizing the content on each page of your website in short paragraphs or small chunks. Headlines and subheads are great ways to break up content so that it is visually appealing and easy to read.

Prioritize

The most important copy should be “above the fold” of the page. The goal is to give users the most important information first. Website visitors should be able to access the most important information without having to scroll down the page at all. If users are interested in learning more, they can scroll down the page to read more detail about the topic.

Additionally, your website should be responsive on both desktop and mobile. The most important information should still be visible above the fold, even on a smaller mobile screen.

How Do You Know If Your Website Content Is Working?

The most important part of making any changes is the ability to test and monitor the effectiveness of those changes.

Analytics metrics

While increases in the volume of traffic to your website can be valuable, you always want to make sure the quality of those users are strong. Below is an overview of a few metrics that measure the quality of visits on your website. It’s important to look at these metrics together as a whole, rather than focusing on one specifically.

• Bounce Rate: The percentage of sessions that ended without the user navigating to another page on the site. (Bounce rates for blog pages are always high).
• Time on Site: The average amount of time each session on the website lasted
• Pages/Session: The average number of pages that were viewed during each session on the website
• Goal completions: The total number of goals users completed on your website

HotJar

HotJar is a website tracking tool that gathers information on how users interact with your website. HotJar provides heatmaps of user interaction with your site, conversion funnel analysis, and form analysis. This data is very helpful when measuring if the content and conversion tools on your website are engaging to users and push them to take the specific action you are tracking.

Write Your Content Right

Not sure where to begin? Let us help! We specialize in diving into your business and learning your market so we can write engaging and compelling website content that will guide users through the sales funnel on your website. Drop us a line so we can begin the conversation together.