How effective is the text on your website? Is your site designed to draw in leads, inform potential customers, and support conversions? Has it been thoughtfully created to show authority and build trust? Or are the words on your site just fillers, serving as a framework for your stylish design or multimedia elements?
These are important questions to ask, whether you’re considering a website relaunch or simply taking stock of your online marketing assets. To help you assess the quality of your written Web content, here are a few self-inventory questions to ask.
Assessing Your Website Content
- Is all of my website content unique? It can sometimes be tempting to plagiarize yourself, especially if your website has a lot of product or service listings. Using boilerplate language from one page to the next may be convenient, but it can also incur penalties from Google, diminishing your search engine visibility. Uniqueness is key to effective content.
- Who was my content written for? There’s not necessarily one right answer to this question… but if you can’t answer it at all, then that probably means your content was designed without a buyer persona or any kind of data about your target audience. And that, in turn, means you probably haven’t honed in on user questions or pain points. Writing for a more clearly defined audience can help you achieve your sales and marketing goals.
- How’s the formatting? Is it easy to read your content? Do you have spacing, bullet points, subheadings, and short sentences to facilitate skimming? And does your content look just as sharp on a mobile device as it does on a desktop computer?
- Does my content have action-oriented language? We generally advise business owners to include at least one clear call to action on each page, whether that’s an invitation for the reader to call you, schedule an appointment, or shop in your online store. Make sure your content aligns with the sales funnel, and that you use strong action words to guide readers through next steps.
- Does your content answer common questions? The best content usually follows the consumer’s journey. What this means is, you begin with general concepts and definitions of terms, then move through common questions, objections, or pain points. Again, your website content provides you with a great opportunity to guide potential clients through their initial product research to a point where they are ready to buy.
- Does my content convey trust? The most effective content gives people a reason to trust you. This may mean listing your awards and accolades, outlining your experience, citing testimonials and reviews, or simply conveying your knowledge of the industry. In particular, bio and about us pages can be great places to highlight your expertise.
- How old is my content? If your content is full of references that might have been dated during the George Bush administration, or if it doesn’t capture the ways in which your value proposition has expanded or evolved, then you should probably spend some time updating it. (One good rule of thumb: Any statistics or studies you cite should be no more than three years old.)