Written content: 5 reasons why your website needs it

You might think that since I’m a content writer I advocate the benefits of written content rather than various other formats of content that you find on the Internet, and basically in every medium. I don’t mind telling you that yes, I prefer written content over video or graphic content because I write and make a living off it.

Does content marketing constitute just written content?

No way. Every format of content has its own place and importance. If that were not the case websites like Pinterest (for posting images) and YouTube wouldn’t have been such great hits. These websites are not just for posting images and videos, they also get lots of traffic for various business websites. So if you hire me as a content marketer I would carefully study what sort of content your target audience prefers and then help you execute a content marketing strategy accordingly. In that sense I’m not biased towards writing simply because I provide content writing services.

Why your website needs written content

There are many people who think that their website does not need written content and they have their own reasons. If they don’t need written content, well, it’s their prerogative and I’m sure they know what they’re doing. Some websites actually don’t need text and they can do fairly well by solely depending on images and videos – it depends on your business model. But since I provide content writing services, my primary focus is highlighting the reasons why your website needs written, textual content.

1. Improve your SEO with written content: Yes, every sort of content these days gets indexed but there is a reason why you require text to search engine optimize your images and videos. Technology that can rank multiple formats of content mainly by processing visual cues hasn’t been developed yet. The rankings depend on the text surrounding images and videos. If you’re using images on your website, you need to put appropriate text within the alt attribute of the image HTML tags and you need to surround your image with related text to convey to the search engines exactly what the image represents. The same happens with your video. Even if you post your video on YouTube or one of the social networking websites, it’s the text that you use to describe your video that decides what type of rankings it enjoys. Given a choice between written text, images and videos, it’s the written text that enjoys better rankings because it’s easier to process text.
2. Educate your prospective customers and clients: You can do this even with videos and images and in fact, there is a popular saying “a picture is worth thousand words” but can you create something like FAQs using images or videos? Yes, you can create how-to videos that may look more friendly compared to written content but it’s always easier to follow step-by-step written instructions rather than watch a video, pause it, do what needs to be done, then play the video again, then again pause it, and so on. The written content on the other hand, simply stays in front of you – you can read the instructions and do what you need to do seamlessly.
3. Create scalable content: Written content is easily scalable. It can be viewed on every possible device including smart watches. The text doesn’t distort no matter how big you make it, which is not possible with images and videos. Text can be easily printed without wasting paper and ink. It can be easily copy/pasted without needing extra software or tools. No matter what width your browser window has, your written content can be easily viewed.
4. Produce and publish written content easily: It’s easier to publish and also less expensive. I don’t mean to undermine my profession, but you can easily find content writers but it’s always very difficult, and very expensive to work with a graphic designer or videographer. An infographic can easily cost you upwards $350 whereas you can get a blog post or an article of the same quality for $50. You don’t need special applications to produce written content. You can do it even using notepad. Publishing platforms like WordPress are meant to publish written content although these days they also allow you to seamlessly publish videos and images.
5. Create accessible content: Many governments these days make it mandatory to create accessible websites and this means the information on the websites should be readable by screen readers. These screen readers for the visually impaired can process text but they cannot process images and videos.

As I have mentioned above the intention of this blog post is not to say written content is better than images and videos. Every business has its own unique requirement and if your business does not require written content, I don’t recommend it for you.