Alan Draper
With a rapidly expanding wealth of content serving a population trusting the internet for sending and receiving information, your website content has less than ten seconds to convert a user into a prospect.
When a user lands on your website, the first thing they want to read about is the product or service they are interested in and if they don’t find detailed information about it, they’ll happily move to a competing website. What are the steps you can take to keep people on your website?
Here’s a simple three step guide that will help you understand the way online audiences perceive content and what you can do to offer them exactly what they’re looking for.
Market Research
The first step to writing effective website content is a two-phase market research approach – demographic research and psychographic research.
Demographic research includes information such as gender, age group, affluence level, education, and income of your audience. For example, an online cupcake shop will probably have more female buyers, most likely in the age group of 16-40.
Psychographic research is a fairly new concept in the world of content marketing. It involves an analysis of user preferences, lifestyle choices, and so on. You can learn more about psychographic research here.
The Yahoo! Style Guide’s online page also has a comprehensive list of audience measurement resources.
Read, read, and read more
Read content on competitor websites or just any reputable website on the internet to understand the framework of website content writing. You’ll notice that a lot of websites use catchy headlines and descriptive content to define their products in an engaging, yet pithy style.
This is best achieved by listing product features in a bullet list, enabling users to scan through the features easily, instead of reading a thick paragraph of text.
Reading more content online will also help you get an insight into how online content is different from offline content, and what changes you need to make to your website content.
Check website analytics
Tools like Google Analytics offer in-depth statistics on user behavior, traffic, and geographic data. An important metric here is the bounce rate. The bounce rate indicates the percentage of users leaving your website from a particular page.
A significantly high bounce rate suggests that something is wrong with your website. While there are many reasons for a high bounce rate (spammy page, lack of multiple payment options, out of stock products), the content on the page can also be one of the reasons.
Be descriptive – think about what you would expect from the product as a customer and strive to provide information that will help them making a buying decision.
These three tips should get you started in the right direction. Online resources such as The Yahoo! Style Guide, Copyblogger, and several free ebooks from Hubspot will also provide details on writing for the web.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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Doing research is the most important thing one needs to remember, having a research will give you a clear idea on what points you need to include and what not to include.
True. Too often people just start writing and don’t do any research. It rarely works unless you are already an expert in the topic. Even then, a little research can go a long way.