When you first launch your website, it’s exciting and new. Oftentimes, you have worked for months on every detail, from the copy to the imagery. But over time, the content may become stale or out of date. Here are a few tips for optimizing the content on your website.
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- Write for your audience. The first step to optimizing your website’s content is to write for your audience. Who are you trying to reach with your website? What kind of information do they want to see? Write content that is relevant and interesting to your target audience. Learn more about personas.
- Keep it fresh. Once you have a good understanding of who you’re writing for, it’s important to keep your content fresh. To ensure content is up to date, we recommend developing a content calendar and a publishing lifecycle to keep content up to date. If you have a blog or FAQs, it’s important to regularly review the copy to ensure nothing is out of date or may just be irrelevant to your user. This means regularly publishing new and original content.
- Make it easy to read. When it comes to the actual content on your website, make sure it is easy to read. This comes from not only the language you use but the format in which you write the content. Here are a few tips.
- Plain language. Don’t use heavy jargon or slang. It’s important to make sure your content is comprehendible.
- Chunk your content. Break long content out into smaller paragraphs for easy scanning.
- Use headlines, sub-headlines, bullets, and numbered lists. In addition to chunking out content, structure the content hierarchy with headlines and sub-headlines. Also, reduce information into a bullet or numbers lists.
- Use active voice. The subject of the sentence performs the action.
- Front-load Important Information. Journalists referred to this as an inverted pyramid meaning that the important information should be at the top and the less important information at the bottom.
- Use images and videosIn addition to written content, images and videos can also be used to optimize your website. People are more likely to engage with visual content than text-only content, so incorporating images and videos into your site can help to keep visitors engaged. Just make sure that any videos you embed are hosted on a reliable platform like YouTube or Vimeo, as self-hosted videos can take forever to load.
- Promote your content. Once you’ve created some great content, it’s time to promote it! There are a number of ways you can promote your content, including social media, email marketing, and paid advertising. The key is to find the method (or methods) that work best for you and your business.
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This list is just the start of ways you can optimize your website content. Once you’ve established the foundation of best practices, you can dig into analytics and start measuring and testing content to ensure that your subjects are reaching your targeted audience.
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