Category Archives: Content Writing

5 Content Writing Tips to Win Over Your Customers

Why do you need to read about content writing tips to win over your customers?

Interesting question (patting my own back here). Many people actually want to read, and should read these content writing tips because although they are writing and publishing lots of content on their website and blog, they are not getting customers. Why is it so?

This is because many people want to use content writing without understanding its real meaning. They get confused.

You see, taking a shortcut is a natural human proclivity so it isn’t like, people are nasty. It just happens. Even if I didn’t know how important content writing is for winning over your customers I would do all sorts of silly things assuming that they are the right things to do.

In fact, so much junk content was being written to win the SEO game that Google had to come up with updates like Panda and Penguin to weed out content that was published solely to get better search engine rankings. Again, I’m pretty sure that most of the people indulging in such activities weren’t even aware that they were not right practices. Many were prompted by their the so-called “SEO experts”.

If you don’t follow these tips (the tips that I have listed here) then you run the risk of spending lots of time and money on a wasteful activity. No matter at what stage of content writing and content marketing you are, even if the harm is done, it can be undone.

Why content writing plays an important role in getting you more customers?

To be frank, there is a trust deficit on the Internet. Not everybody is out there to get your money, but many people are. Also, since there is practically no entry barrier when it comes to setting up shop on the Internet (you can do it practically free), there are many “businesses” that are not businesses.

One of the greatest reasons why you need content writing to get more customers is that advertising is growing less and less effective. As you must have experienced yourself, people don’t want to see ads – even you don’t want to see ads when you’re looking for information or when you are entertaining yourself. People even use ad blockers these days to make sure they don’t encounter ads.

Continuous content publishing, on the other hand, helps you establish relationships. This is because, effective content writing means providing solutions to people’s problems. When do you use the search engine? When you are looking for some information. Even when you want to buy something, even when you want to hire a service, you look for things in the form of a question, something like “is there a content writing service for my boutique?”.

Continuously writing and publishing content in today’s context means providing solutions to people’s problems. If you can consistently solve people’s problems (directly, or slightly indirectly, pertaining to your business) they begin to trust you, and when they trust you, they do business with you.

Also, there is lots of noise on the Internet and your important messages tend to get lost. People’s attention span has come down drastically. This means you have to constantly be in front of them. Your updates should constantly appear in front of them. There must be some way you remain on their radar. When they need something they should know that you provide that thing.

Tips for writing website content to win over your customers

Your website content should be all about helping your customers. The more you help them, the more you get them. A good example would be the Open Forum Blog maintained by American Express. The multinational financial service doesn’t use Open Forum to promote its business directly, but indirectly. The forum is full of useful information for business executives and managers. The information is so good that it can be used to build an entire business. This information and its usefulness generates goodwill for American Express. People who use this information to grow their businesses and careers, when they need financial services, whom do they choose? Of course American Express.

You may think that American Express is a very big company so it can afford to experiment with various forms of marketing. But this sort of success through content writing can also be achieved at a micro level. Just follow the tips below.

Provide answers to people’s questions: Everybody has questions. There is a complete website dedicated to questions – Quora.com. If your prospective customer wants to improve his search engine rankings he will be probably looking for “how can I improve my search engine rankings?”. Provide this answer. Giving answers builds trust. It helps to solve people’s problems. When you solve people’s problems they like your content writing. When they like it, they appreciate it. When they appreciate it, they readily do business with you. This way you your business gets new customers.
Focus on SEO content writing: On this webpage titled SEO article writing service I have written that there is no such thing as “SEO content” because every piece of well-written content is actually “SEO content”. Nonetheless, you have to take care of your SEO while writing content. Here are a few links that you may like to check out to improve your SEO content writing: 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website; 5 content writing tips to improve SEO; and 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing. Improving your SEO with effective and quality content writing is very essential to bring targeted traffic to your website.
Write consistently and regularly: Content writing isn’t a one-time affair. Millions of webpages and blog posts are being crawled and indexed and, ranked, every day by just Google. You can easily imagine how much content is being published and how much content your content writing has to compete with. If you don’t do content writing regularly, you will be left behind by your competitors because many of them are doing content writing regularly. When you write content consistently and regularly you increase the probability of covering all your topics and also increasing your overall keyword density. Plus, Google likes to index fresh content regularly.
Write longer blog posts and articles: Actually, this is a part of writing SEO content. Google and other search engines these days prefer blog posts and articles over 1000 words. To make things difficult for people who just want to spam search engine results without working hard. If you do some research you will notice that longer blog posts and articles rank higher compared to shorter ones. I would like to stress again that getting good rankings is very important because unless you get your prospective customers to your website, how are you going to make them do business with you? Although there are many other ways of getting your prospective customers to your website (PPC campaigns, for example) the most effective way of getting them over is through effective and passionate content writing.
Talk about benefits and advantages instead of features: Your prospective customers couldn’t care less about how great your product is. What is in it for them? Is it going to solve their problem? Is it going to give them what they want? Is it going to make their life easier? If you want to win over your customers your content writing should focus on benefits and advantages of your product instead of cryptic features. You may like to read Online Copywriting: difference between features and benefits.

Here is another very important point that I missed: create realistic personas before writing your content.

Personas are the profiles of your ideal customers and clients. People will react to your content according to their mental state, their financial state, their age, where they live, what professions they are in, whether they have kids or not and sometimes, what gender they have. If you have a clearly-defined persona laid out in front of you, you can target your content writing in a better, effective manner.

These content writing insights to get more customers for your business are not all-encompassing. I may have missed out a few great tips. But these tips can give you a head start. These tips will stop you from taking a wrong direction.

What is quality content and how does Google recognize it?

Why should you bother how Google defines or recognizes quality content?

Although there are multiple search engines in the world Google sends you the most traffic. So, this is why it matters to you how Google defines or recognizes quality content and then ranks your content accordingly.

As you can see in the chart below, almost 90% of the search market is dominated by Google whereas other “major” search engines like Bing, Yahoo! and even Baidu, have more or less remained at the bottom.

But carefully note the red line representing Google at the top. If you notice, there is a slight downward slant. Although it is still miles ahead of its competitors, it is losing market. Since most of its revenue comes from search advertising, even a small drop in the share of search traffic means a lot to Google.

So there are two reasons why you should bother how Google defines quality content:

Most of your search traffic comes from Google
Google would tenaciously like to hold onto its market dominance by continuing to provide quality content through searches

If Google is unable to find quality content – no matter how it defines it – people will move on to other search engines.

Give Google quality content and Google will rank your website or blog higher

This is not completely true, but it is indisputable that Google will only rank you higher if you have quality content on your website or blog. I have personally experienced that quality content alone doesn’t help you much unless you have tons of it. There are many other factors that affect your ranks including:

The quality of your content, of course
The frequency with which you publish content (the greater the frequency, the better the rankings)
The quantity of quality content that you already have
The age of your domain
The keywords and search terms that you use in the title tag and the headlines
The number of authority websites linking to your content
The social validation your content gets (how many people share your content on social networking websites)
The popularity of your content

A cocktail of these reasons gives you better search engine rankings but all these reasons originate from the fact that you need to have quality content.

Read How to strike a balance between SEO and quality content writing

If you don’t have quality content nobody is going to bother about it and if they don’t bother about it, they won’t share it, they won’t link to it and your content won’t get validation. Without getting social validation, it is very difficult to enjoy good search engine rankings no matter how much quality content you have (although it does have some benefits).

In fact, Google wants quality content so much that it has even created a tutorial on how you can create quality, valuable content.

How does Google define quality content and then ranks it accordingly?

To understand how Google defines quality content, again, you need to understand why Google craves for quality content and not for every type of content irrespective of what its quality is.

Why do you use Google and not another search engine? There might be two reasons:

You are not aware of the existence of any other search engine
You believe that Google gives you the best results for your searches

It’s the second reason that keeps Google hungry for quality content. Whenever you do a search on Google, Google wants to find you the best results. If it doesn’t find you the best results, gradually some other search engine will, and you will move on to that search engine.

This is why among the most brilliant minds on earth working at Google are constantly creating algorithms to find quality content on the Internet.

Now that we know why you need to bother with how Google defines or recognizes quality content and why Google craves quality content, we can come to the topic of how Google defines quality content.

Listed below are the examples of inferior content, according to Google:

Scrapped content
Thin content (Read What is thin content according to Google? Does it harm your SEO?)
Doorway pages
Pages and blog posts senselessly stuffed with your keywords
Webpages and blog posts solely created to draw traffic with no value
Content containing hidden text or links
Cloaking
Automatically generated text strings
Content lifted as it is from other websites and blogs

The folks at Google dislike inferior content or low-quality content so much that they penalize your website by lowering its rankings or worse, completely removing your links from its index.

You may also like to read quality content guidelines straightaway from Google.

Listed below are a few factors that Google uses to define quality content:

Write content for your users not merely for search engines.
Provide information people are actually looking for – don’t mislead people by deceptive titles.
If possible write expert-level content. According to this Search Engine Journal blog post, Google’s human raters as well as algorithms can distinguish between content written by an amateur and content written by a pro.
Become a resource. Link to high quality content from other websites and blogs. Cite reputed publications like the New York Times and Time whenever possible. When you come across quality content on other websites, refer to it from your own website.
Publish fresh content as much as possible. Google is ravenous about fresh content. It crawls your website or blog repeatedly, sometimes multiple times a day to check whether you have published something new. Though, publishing with great frequency doesn’t mean you compromise on quality content. Publish less, but definitely stick to quality.
Abundantly use images and videos. It enhances your presentation and it has been observed that the top 10 ranked sites in Google search results normally have around 6-8 images.
Deliver what you promise in your web page title. Misleading titles attract penalty from Google. Your page title and content should always match.
Create lengthy posts and webpages. Since it is difficult to create long content, and if you are publishing lots of long content, the Google algorithm assumes that you are publishing quality content. Longer blog posts and articles also tend to have lots of information and useful images.

These are the factors using which Google defines quality content. These factors may not play a crucial role all the time at the same time, a majority of these factors are considered when Google tries to assess whether you are publishing quality content or not.

5 website content writing tips you can start using immediately

5 website content writing tips you can immediately use in order to create high-quality, engaging content

Create a list of your main keywords and search phrases

A major part of website content writing is writing your content using your keywords and search phrases that people may use in order to look for your website or your service or your business.

Read Does keyword-rich content help you improve your SEO?

This is why it’s very important to understand the psychology of your prospective customers and clients.

In most of the cases they are not looking for products and services, they’re looking for solutions. So, when you are writing content for your website, talk about solutions and benefits rather than features.

Use your keywords and search phrases while creating your title and while writing the headlines. This is a tip you can start using right now. Do some basic keyword research using Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends.

Write for your visitors and not for search engines

When you get too bogged down by the idea of writing for search engines you don’t write good website content. Remember that it’s humans were going to read your content.

Read How to write content for humans but optimize for Google and other search engines.

Of course, search engine crawlers and algorithms are going to process your content but remember these days your search engine rankings don’t depend only on the number of times you have used your keywords and search phrases within your website content.

It is just one of the factors.

There are many factors that affect your search engine rankings and all these factors can only be affected by quality writing. Use your keywords, but write in a conversational style, in an engaging style. Try to solve problems instead of harping about your product or service greatness.

Keep everything above the fold

In order to access useful information people shouldn’t have to scroll down. This is more important when you are writing business website content. Whatever important you want to say about your product or service, bring it up within the first paragraph or within the first 1-3 paragraphs that are visible without someone having to scroll down the page.

Don’t ignore mobile users

A majority of businesses these days access your website or blog using a mobile phone or tablet.

So, always write your website content keeping them in mind. Write shorter sentences. Use shorter paragraphs. Highlight important portions. Make your text scannable. Use simple language that people can read even in shaky environments (for example riding a train or bus). Use clear language. Remember that you are not aiming for a literary award. You don’t want to confuse your readers.

In fact, many suggest that you use as many familiar words as possible so that people don’t have to wonder what you are trying to say.

Don’t assume people already know what you’re talking about

Remember that most of the people coming to your website will be coming from links other than your homepage. They will come across your links in search engine results or other websites so they may not have any clue what you’re talking about.

So, a very important website content writing tip is that paint a complete picture whenever you’re writing a web page or blog post. Even when you are introducing concepts you have already talked about, link to those concepts and briefly explain them.

These are the main 5 website content writing tips that you can start using immediately in order to create great content for your website or blog.

Although you may come across a blog post talking of 15 website content writing tips or even 50 website content writing tips but they are primarily the subsets of the tips that I have mentioned above. Stick to the fundamentals. Empathize with your readers. Use the language that they use (use keywords and search phrases). Offer them solutions they can use immediately. Make your content readable on all devices.

Looking for insightful blog posts on content writing, and SEO copywriting? You will find them on Credible Content Blog. Updated almost daily. Fresh, unique perspective.

Category Archives: Content Writing

Give the Right Answers and Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

5 Content Writing Tips to Win Over Your Customers

Why do you need to read about content writing tips to win over your customers?

Why content writing plays an important role in getting you more customers?

Tips for writing website content to win over your customers

5 content writing tips to improve SEO

What does improving SEO with content writing mean?