The Three Major Elements of Quality Website Content

Thinking like a user is one of those things that sounds easy to do but proves challenging in practice.  With all forms of marketing becoming even more pervasive as technology advances, data indicates that users are only becoming less tolerant of writing that is promotional in nature, rather than conversational.  That fact presents an interesting challenge for anyone faced with the prospect of writing copy for business:  how can you positively grow your brand without sounding artificial?  Here are three things that users consistently value and that we strive to establish with all of the content we generate for clients.

If you read articles or other blogs online, you may have noticed an emergent trend in content formatting over the last few years.  Increasingly, content is formatted less like a traditional article or a page from a book, and more like a series of distinguished sections or even lists of several small items accompanied by a couple of brief paragraphs.  This is by design, as studies have shown that most users don’t actually read the full content of a page on a website.

Maybe you’re deflated by that fact – we definitely were when we first found out!  It can take hours to generate even a few really good paragraphs of content related to a product or service, and the last thing you’d want to hear after doing that is that no one’s going to actually read it.  Before you delete that open text document, though, consider that this is actually a blessing in disguise.  Studies show that users have a more positive experience when they can easily scan the entire content of a page and identify the information they’re actually looking for.  When it comes to the writing process, that means you can save time by summarizing each unique idea with a heading or title and presenting the important ideas in a more concise and digestible fashion.  That’s still easier said than done, but it’s way more preferable than generating walls of text with complex introductions to just a few major points.  Everybody wins!

Continuing the trend of “things you want to do but shouldn’t” when it comes to content generation, the next thing you should reconsider when writing copy for your business is making it sound too awesome.  Don’t get me wrong, your business is awesome, but it’s all too easy to make that point too much or too heavily and end up making your users skeptical of your brand.  All users, especially users that aren’t customers yet, have a base level of inherent distrust for promotional language, and overusing it in your core marketing material can prompt your audience to question the credibility of your claims rather than positively interpret the meaning or value that you’re trying to convey.  Using adjectives like ‘superb’ or ‘great’ or phrases like ‘paradigm shift’ might look good on-screen, but they can just as easily alienate your users if they appear too frequently or in the wrong context.

Conversely, it’s also easy to go too far in the opposite direction by establishing a tone that’s too conversational.  By trying too hard to identify with your users on a personal level, you risk sacrificing an authoritative sense of value in your core proposition.  Even worse, you can still end up making users wary of your brand by trying to appeal to them in a way that seems inauthentic or pandering.

Best advice we can offer?  Prioritize information over buzzwords and authenticity over ambiguity.  It’s not a mistake that search algorithms are designed to prioritize content that is relevant to a user’s query – that’s the whole business model.  Your content should invite users to learn something new or provide them with specific information that applies to their purchasing decision.  If conversion is possible, it will happen naturally after you’ve met that fundamental need.

This is likely the most difficult thing to achieve with your content.  If you’ve done any sort of copywriting before, you probably know at least two things about the process:  it’s hard to get on a roll, and when you finally do, it’s hard to stop.  The good news is that general writing guidelines also apply to marketing copy – keep it concise, present your ideas in a logical segmented order, and cut out anything that isn’t absolutely relevant.  Speed and efficiency are absolutely critical to the user experience on every level, so it’s a good idea to get in the habit of summarizing your content in a way that will make it easy to identify the key points without making the user feel like they’ve wasted time arriving at them.  Feel free to get in the zone and churn out 12 paragraphs of excellent writing if that’s your style, but don’t forget to come back and read it with a fresh set of eyes and edit out anything that doesn’t serve the real purpose behind your content.

Hopefully you’ve found this information sufficiently scannable, objective, and brief.  If this helped and you’d like more useful info on how to improve your marketing copy, feel free to get in touch!