How to write content for a website: great ideas and examples
Do you write lots of content on your site but do not receive results? Ok, this article is definitely for you. We give the basics of commercial copywriting – we tell you how to write text for the site. To please everyone: potential clients and search engine crawlers.
What is the difference between a good text and a bad
Bad text is useless. Although it should answer questions, provide interesting information, and provide important details. Experts from Woffex.com have noticed some details which make website content very unpleasant.
The main signs of bad text, only clogging the search results:
Lots of “water.”
“Water”– all unnecessary and empty in the text. These are words and sentences that are irrelevant to the topic or are well-known to everyone or have no meaning. “Water” should be “poured out.”
No uniqueness
The text will be non-unique, if it is copied from somewhere (in whole or parts), or simply rewritten from other sources. So-called rewriting can provide 100% technical uniqueness, but it will not add any value to the article, unlike professional article writing. It’s out of the question to fend off competitors.
The sea of errors
Misprints and mistakes are the norms only in authors’ blogs and personal posts on social networks (as a rule, friends and loyal readers take them calmly). However, you should not breed illiteracy on a commercial site – it is the face of business, after all.
Totally “tripe”
The text can be an important thesis and useful information, but if there is a problem with the structure – few people will read such a text. Then its usefulness tends to be zero.
The trouble with the structure – when there is no logic, paragraphs, subheadings, lists and boxes, introduction and conclusion, a call to action, etc.
It’s all in a bunch.
You want to order services on the query “repair of washing machines,” and here you are – and how to repair it yourself and how does the washing machine.
Spam
The text many times repeated the same words and phrases, and there is incorrect inflection and strange turns of phrase – immediately visible that they tried to do for the sake of the search engine.
Writing something like “buy an inexpensive baby electric car price”– to show disrespect to the reader. We don’t talk like that in real life.
A good text, on the contrary, changes the world for the better. It is unique, structured, literate, simple, and clear, yet informative and expert. Actually, lots of site owners use different content-writing services and it makes sense. Such a text conquers the top almost without SEO efforts.
Stages of creating a good text
The main stages of work on the text:
- Answer three questions: what we are writing about, who will read it, and, most importantly, why.
To go in the right direction right away, you need to clearly define the target audience, find the topic and formulate the purpose of the text.
- Sketch out an outline of the article with talking points.
Before you write anything, you need to outline the article’s thesis statement.
Abstracts are the main points on the topic, short and succinct statements. They are the backbone of the future text.
Advice to novice authors: it is better to distract the editor once more and coordinate the work at the stage of theses than to rewrite the ready text in its entirety.
- Collect information.
There are rare situations where the entire text can be written based on personal experience. Mostly you have to monitor dozens of sources, spend hours testing the services, and repeatedly communicate with experts. Sometimes you cannot do without reading a couple of books and taking several video courses.
It is hard to say how much time and effort this process will take – it all depends on the subject, the format of the text, the availability of experts, and, of course, the professionalism of the author.
- Write a draft.
It is better not to try to make a perfect text at once. To begin with, it is worth pouring into an empty document all the information you have gathered, to set out the flow of thoughts without any edits.
The setting of commas and quotation marks, and correction of spelling errors – all this is done in the next stage. When it becomes clear that there is meaning, power, and truth in the text blank.
To understand this, there is good exercise. You just have to imagine yourself in the reader’s shoes and don’t hesitate to ask tricky questions:
- So what?
- What’s in it for me?
- Where are the guarantees?
- Why is it so expensive?
- How is it better than others?
And other stuff like that.
- Prepare the text for publication.
It’s time to start editing: removing difficult turns, correcting punctuation, captioning images, etc.
Often you have to edit in several steps, but that’s fine. The main thing is to take breaks so that each time you look at the text with fresh eyes.
By the way, during editing, it is useful to read aloud. The tongue will in any case “stumble” over unreadable passages, even if the “washed out” eye ignores them.
Important: Before sending the finished text for publication, double-check everything – figures and facts, names and surnames of experts, etc.
P. S. The text – is not the most important thing
The text is just a tool. One of many.
You cannot rely on text as the only way to increase sales and profits. Even in SEO, content has only a partial impact.
Before you say that the content does not sell and the copywriter is to blame, you need to make sure that everything is fine with the product, employees, business processes, and the overall marketing strategy.
The text itself is just a form of presenting the information. When you can replace text with illustrations or video, you should do so.