End Your Struggle to Build Traffic with Quality Content, my Top 4 Tips

Your content, whether it’s text, video or audio, is the foundation of any web property. After years of creating websites and building traffic to them, I’ve seen the difference great quality content makes over superficial, keyword-stuffed fluff. It’s the difference between one-time visitors who may click a few ads and a loyal fan club of readers who buy or engage again and again. Following a few simple guidelines can help make sure the content you put on your website, blog or other web property is top notch.

Here are my 4 top tips to create compelling content.

Provide a Benefit

Your readers come to your site because they get some valuable benefit every time they visit. If they don’t, they’ll stop coming. I’ve found publishing practical information in the form of how-tos and tutorials is one of the easiest ways to benefit readers, but there are other ways. You could provide up-to-date news and information that helps your readers keep up on the latest developments in your niche. Content that entertains or inspires also gives your readers a reason to keep coming back.

Do Your Research

Filling your web properties with solidly researched, reliable information establishes you as an authority and builds trust in your visitors. If you expect your visitors to hand over their hard-earned cash for your services or products, this is vital. If you buy content, it’s well worth investing in content from a company you can trust to do in-depth research for every piece of content you order.

When you create your own content, instead of rummaging around Google for ideas, try conducting your own research so you’ll have something fresh and unique to offer your visitors. This could be anything ranging from a long-term case study to a quick experiment to test out a theory you have. Truly unique content like this wins repeat visitors and attracts links naturally, giving you an improved Google ranking.

Create User-Friendly Content

Writing that engages your readers is the first key to user-friendly content. It needs to be well written, but you’ll also want to use a tone that matches the image you want to present. Few people are willing to slog through pages of complex sentences and obscure technical terms. Writing in a conversation tone not only makes your writing more enjoyable to read, but it also lets your true voice and personality shine through. When your readers feel like they can almost hear you talking to them, they’ll be a lot more likely to trust you and want to interact with you. In fact, I’ve noticed my more casual blog posts get more comments than my longer, more technical posts.

Conversational doesn’t mean sloppy, though. You’ll still need to make sure your main ideas are clearly presented, easy to understand and flow logically. If your readers have to struggle to get your point, chances are they won’t bother. Flow is especially important with any content you expect to convert into sign-ups or sales. This is where truly high quality content wins hands down over keyword articles. It’s nearly impossible to tell a compelling, sales-pulling story when you’re worried about fitting in a certain number of keywords.

Good formatting is another essential part of creating user-friendly content. Readers aren’t going to stick around a site that gives them a headache. To make your content easier on the eye, use paragraphs of no more than three or four lines and keep your main column widths between 40 to 75 characters wide. Go for traditional, easy-to-read fonts like Verdana, Ariel, and Georgia in a medium text size.

Make it Worth Sharing

These days a strong social media presence is vital for gaining new readers. Social sites Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest people have gotten accustomed to sharing whatever interesting finds they come across with dozens if not hundreds of people at a time.

It’s pretty obvious no one’s going to share a keyword-stuffed pile of word salad, but mediocre content won’t fare much better. To really benefit from social media, you must provide content that’s unique, highly useful or in some other way remarkable. Your content has to stand out from the dozens of other webpages your readers scan during their day. Before you publish, think about whether or not what you’re offering is something you yourself would take the time share.

Keywords and other on-page SEO factors will always be important. After all, text is the only way the search engines know what a webpage is about. Ultimately, though, keywords take a back seat to great quality content that attracts links, gets shared, builds trust and wins sales. Stock your web properties with unique, quality content and you won’t have to struggle for an improved Google ranking or repeat visitors.

What Next?

Great content takes time and effort to create. If you don’t have time to create your own then we can help.  We have a team of copywriters waiting to research and deliver your content. We will ensure you’re  happy with any copy before it’s published and we will always adhere to the principles above.