Having a modern and stylish website will provide you with a professional looking online ‘shop window’ for your business but you will need more than that to make it successful. Having great content is what will attract visitors to your site, both in terms of performing well in search engine rankings and so that people are compelled to visit your website to view your great content, via links from social media accounts.
Define your target audience
One of the most important factors to consider when creating content is the target audience. There is no point writing great content if it is irrelevant to the people who will be your potential customers. Spend some time trying to build up an understanding of your target audience – are there some forums or groups that they belong to? What is important to them? Use all of this information to build a ‘target audience persona’ that you can use to tailor your marketing strategy around.
Create useful information
You should be using your content to persuade your target audience that you are an expert in your field, providing useful information so that they will turn to you if they need advice or to hire your services. This could comprise of providing a step-by-step process on how to fix a problem they have.
Lets take an example of someone who provides decorating services. They could provide a 5-step guide on how to hang wallpaper. Anybody who is looking for some guidance on this would be able to search and find this guide and have a look at the services that are provided.
Whilst they may then try to wallpaper themselves, they may decide that hiring a professional could be a better option when they look at some examples of showcased work on the website. Or they could do the wallpapering themselves this time and be so happy with the guidance that they share it with their network, increasing the reach and making other people aware of this decorating business. Creating useful content is a really big factor in driving traffic to your website.
Have a reliable website that is easy to navigate
If your website is difficult to navigate around or it is frequently offline, then your great content is not getting the success it deserves. Make sure that you have the right web hosting service to provide a high level of website performance. Planet Hippo and other good web hosting services can provide an idea of the performance levels you need from your website to ensure customers don’t get frustrated with your website.
Use engaging tools/channels
You can create great content but the way it is presented is crucial. If you have pages of unbroken text then it isn’t appealing to a reader at all. Make use of features like video, graphics and software that can help create attractive online guides, newsletters, brochures etc.
If you can create useful information that appeals to the right audience, and is SEO friendly this should ensure that your website content works really well.