High-quality website content matters.
You need the right words written in a way that resonates with your audience and reflects who you are.
By the “right words,” I mean two things: text that explains who you are and the benefits your business provides, and keywords that help you rank on search engines and draw your target audience to you. These two things have to co-exist on your site, offering both style and substance.
The style comes from crafting a compelling narrative about your business and its various offerings. You don’t want generic, boilerplate content but something unique and exclusive to you.
The substance comes from search engine optimization (SEO), a term you might be familiar with. It is an essential factor in website writing because it provides a link between you and your potential customers. Optimizing a page for a particular search term can help attract the people searching for that term, be it a product or service that you offer.
“If your website doesn’t have the words people are searching for on it, your best people won’t be able to find you, no matter what service you offer.”
Hannah Martin, TheSEOKitchen via Threads
Build Authenticity and Trust with a Human Voice
Website content has to be specific to you and your business, and tailored to communicate a message that is yours alone. Authenticity matters to your audience and you cannot convey authenticity if you sound like everyone else. (It also matters to Google, for the record.)
You can probably tell where I’m going with this–away from machines and toward humans. Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot achieve the customized content you need for your site. AI chatbots create their responses by basing them on what they find elsewhere online. Theirs is not original content, just a remix of what someone else has written.
You need a human to evaluate a page for keyword usage that does not sound forced, to add style and flow to your text, and to ensure the individual qualities of your business come through.
“The human touch in content creation holds great value as it imbues a unique, engaging quality that resonates with users. This allows content to stand out in a competitive market and helps build trust with your audience.”
Scott Keever, Forbes
My Approach to Website Content Writing
When optimizing content for a web page, you have to strike a fine balance between keyword presence and good writing.
As I noted in a blog post about SEO, you can’t just add filler stuffed with keywords–search engines can detect that kind of content and will not rank it well. Your content has to be relevant, of good quality, original, and structured for ease of reading. My web writing includes these crucial components:
- research of your business and competitors to ensure content is accurate, complete, and unique to you
- optimizing for keywords and related terms without overdoing it or making it sound spammy
- attention to the structure of the site and creating internal links between pages
- use of headings, lists, and images (where applicable) to break up the text and improve readability
- optimized SEO titles and meta descriptions
If you’d like to talk about your website copy, contact me for an initial consultation, at no charge to you.
Photo of typewriter by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash.