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You’ve found a web developer to help put your website together, and a graphic designer to help you create your brand, now it’s up to you to write the words for your website!

The information and words on your website is also called content, or copy, and is used to promote your products and services, and attract visitors.

Why does my website need great content?

Your website needs engaging, up-to-date content to help you build a relationship and connection with your audience. People want content that’s easy to read, engaging, has value and is educational, informative or entertaining.

Here are three questions to keep in mind when creating content for your website:

• What information do your customers expect to find on your website?
• Is the content relevant and interesting to your audience?
• How should the content be presented to best communicate with your target audience?

Six tips to help you create engaging content for your business website

1.      Identify your target market

• Before you sit down to create your content, make sure you clearly define who your target market is and understand their interests and needs. Knowing your market will help you personalise your information to the right audience and maximise the chance of your message reaching the right people.

2.      Quality is key

• Write in short, concise sentences and paragraphs to allow the reader to easily digest the content.
• Use active voice where possible (for example, ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ not, ‘The lazy dog was jumped over by the quick brown fox’).
• Make sure your content is original, relevant, accurate and current—remember old news is no news.

Creating useful and original content about things your target audience would be interested in is important for search engine optimisation (SEO).

SEO is the process of improving a website’s ranking on a search engine’s results page with the core purpose of providing the most relevant results in response to a search term.

3.      Create a good structure for your content

• Structure your content so that important information doesn’t go unnoticed. Put important parts at the beginning of the article or page so you can grab the reader’s attention straight away.
• Keep pages short and break content up with white space to provide uncluttered, readable pages. Consider using:
  • headings and sub-headings (this is known as H1, H2 and H3 in HTML)
  • bullet points and tables where appropriate
  • graphics and visuals to break up text and make your content more appealing to read
  • keywords, highlighted hyperlinks and bolded words to draw attention to key points.

Make sure that the content you create can be viewed on different devices and platforms. Content that looks good on a desktop computer may not look the same on a mobile screen. Your content should be designed (also known as optimised) to suit all devices.

4.      Choose the right format

You can present your content in a number of ways, including through:

• text, such as:
  • feature articles
  • short news stories
  • blog posts
  • social media messages.
• multimedia content, such as:
  • images, e.g. an infographic or picture
  • interactive content, e.g. an interactive map
  • audio, e.g. a podcast
  • video, e.g. interviews or animation.

You can choose to use one or a number of different formats to present your content in. When choosing the best format, make sure you consider things such as your target market, your branding, and the costs involved for each format.

5.      Repurpose your content

Creating relevant, original content can be a little overwhelming and time consuming. The good news is that there are options to create one piece of content and turn it into multiple pieces.

Here are some ideas to turn one larger piece of content, for example, a page on your website, into many different mediums:

• Take the main message of the content and turn it into a smaller blog post or news article.
• Ask your graphic designer, or do it yourself (DIY), and turn the blog post into an infographic that can be used in the actual post, newsletter or on your social media pages.
• Pull out the important messages and turn them into short social media posts with links back to the complete blog post or larger content page.

6.      Save information for future updates and promotion

• It can be useful to create a stockpile of content for publishing in the future. This helps you make sure you’ve got new content on hand even when you’re under the pump running your business.
• It’s important to make sure any content you create for publishing in the future is information that will still be relevant when you publish it.

Want to write your own content but need some help?

If you think you need some help to create content for your website, you might consider hiring a professional copywriter who specialises in writing for websites. Hiring a professional can help you make sure your content is expressed clearly and effectively.

Tip: When working with a professional copywriter, make sure that you retain the copyright over the written content.