Good content resonates positively with your visitors. It will keep them interested in your website for longer, make them more likely to share it, and motivate them to contact you or make a purchase.

In the modern online world, there is a flood of promotional diarrhoea and meaningless content. Adhering to these four pillars will help you to construct your content in a meaningful way – creating relevant content that promotes credibility and trust amongst visitors.

Answer the Correct Questions

A simple strategy of “if you build it, they will come” is not going to cut it. Before creating your content, really think about the type of person or groups that you expect will visit your website, and want from your site.

To find the questions that need answering, you can monitor social media and blogs and ask for feedback, send out surveys or identify any conferences or networking events they attend.

The Electrospinning Company is a good example of this – they have identified that their visitors are from universities and companies and medical science communities looking for specific information about the electrospinning process and its applications.

Assist Visitors Complete Tasks

People don’t browse the web just to look at pretty website designs, they have a specific set of goals in mind. The content on your website should be organised in an effective and efficient way, allowing people to find or navigate to what they want to see as quickly as possible.

To accomplish this there are two considerations to look at:

Identify what they are looking for: Keep things as simple as possible – remove any distracting or irrelevant information and check that there’s no out of date text or unnecessary menu links.

Know what their choices are: Provide simple options for the different goals of users, and easily direct them to other relevant areas of your website by including “Related Products” or “See Also” sections within your content pages.

Office Essentials achieves this by keeping things simple on their landing page website. There’s no fluff, just the very basics about the company with links to the different services that they offer, easily catering to all types of visitors to the website.

Call to Action – Ask for the Sale

No matter how advanced new web technologies get, with rich, interactive content and flashy images, the old tried & tested tactic of asking for the sale still very much applies. Online, this is referred to as a “Call to Action”, which as encouraging users to go through with a desired action whether it’s to purchase, subscribe, call, register, download or get a quote.

Surprisingly there are many website out there that do not do this well – if at all! Relying on visitors to take it upon themselves to locate and navigate to the contact page is quite a large oversight and can result in many lost conversions.

Map Security has a prominent contact form on the homepage located above the fold making it very easy for visitors to quickly get in touch. Additionally to this, there is a large standout call to action below the content on every page encouraging people to get in touch.

Community and Visibility

More consumers are researching and purchasing products online. Successful marketing and lead generation is influenced by two very important factors: Search Engine Optimisation and social media.

If you align your social marketing and content with your most important keywords, potential clients will use these phrases to find your services or products and will likely find you at the top of Google. I’m sure you’ve noticed how many adverts on TV now include things like “search ‘Best Car 2017’ online!”

Additionally, as you are seen more across the web by creating articles, social media posts and ratings your brand will grow in comfort and familiarity, building trust and credibility.

MGF Excavation Safety Solutions make good use of all their social media accounts as well as posting news regularly on their blog to promote themselves as well as share relevant and interesting industry news.

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Finding the Right Balance

Once a user finds your website, they are in control of how much time they explore your content. If they get bored, frustrated or run out of time they will leave your website in a single click and may never come back!

Content is more often than not the deciding factor. Investing the time into identifying and creating content that is informative and concise will keep your website valued and relevant and will go a long way towards building your brand and online presence.

Nick Wearing

Developer

Although Nick only has only been in the web design industry for a couple of years, he quickly became a valuable member of the Nexus Websites team.