Good Website Content Delivers SEO Results
Building a website from scratch takes time. Even a redesign is time-consuming, involving a number of necessary steps. The website designer and developer you hire require your timely input throughout the process. All website professionals strive to ensure that the style is right for you and that your site includes all the pages necessary to inform your visitors and rank you high in search results.
Your web designer creates a map of your site, called wireframes, before handing the design to a web developer for coding. You must sign off on each stage of development. Meanwhile, other ingredients of the site can be prepared. Web developers typically rely on you to provide the website content.
Why Is Website Content Important?
According to Techopedia, “Web content refers to the textual, aural or visual content published on a website.” Most designers include graphics specifically for your site, based on a chosen theme, which often incorporates your own company photos. The actual content, the text of your site, isn’t always included in your website package. But it’s that website content that’s critical to your site’s success.
The content not only drives search engines to your site, but it also tells your story. It encourages your visitors to contact you and buy what you have to sell. The content is your last chance to close the sale. it’s the last push in your sales funnel to help your website visitors make a final purchase decision.
Website Content and SEO
If your developer doesn’t offer content-writing services, the task of creating website content often falls to you as the business owner. Unless you have the time, talent and inclination to write all the content for your site, we recommend that you hire professional website content producers like Ray Access. If you have writers on staff, however, make sure they:
- Understand the basics of SEO
- Appreciate your company’s goals for its website
- Know how to create compelling calls-to-action
- Have a decent command of the language
Alternatively, you can hire an SEO firm to handle the content. But an SEO firm can cost thousands of dollars per month, even after the set-up charges, while an SEO-savvy writer costs a fraction of that.
The Inevitable Breakdown
As your web developer works to produce a beautiful yet functional website for your company, the deadline for your content looms. If you promised to deliver the content, you have to deliver on time, or your entire project screeches to a halt. Your developer needs the content to drop into the site’s pages before it can go live. And you can’t just use anything; your website requires written, polished and proofed text.
If you’re like most business owners, writing content is pretty far down on your to-do list. Even if you delegated the task, it still needs your final approval. What do you do if it doesn’t meet your expectations? What are your options if your deadline arrives and you’ve only just begun writing?
And there it is — the logjam that holds up many website launches. It’s called a content delay, and it frustrates web developers everywhere. Remember, they don’t get their final payment until the project is finished. If you wait too long to deliver, your project may get put on hold, where it will stay until the developer finds the time to devote to it. By then, the whole project has lost some momentum.
Consequences Abound
By this time, you have no timely alternatives. You may pull something together. You may find early versions of your marketing material and vision statement you can use. But what you end up with is a beautiful new site with sub-par text.
While you can ask your web developer to add newer content later, after your website launches, you’ll pay for the service. Meanwhile, who knows how many potential customers you’ll lose? Your best bet is to hire Ray Access to get it right the first time, on time. If you insist on doing it yourself, however, here are a few tips for you:
- Write your text in a word processing program, one document for each website page.
- Make sure to pass your writing to at least one other person for review. It’s best if this editor knows your company and what you’re trying to say. Your editor can catch errors and remind you of details you may have missed. You can always hire Ray Access to edit it for you inexpensively.
- Sleep on it. Never send copy immediately after you wrote it. Even if you have to postpone your launch, you won’t regret a fresh read to find things that you could say better.
- Include limited notes on each page about where you want the text to appear. A good web developer knows how to make the text work within the design. If the copy goes in a pop-up, for example, note that at the top of your document.
- Be authentic. Your site must reflect you and your company’s personality — but to a point. You won’t do yourself any favors by including too much industry lingo or corny jokes.
- Maintain consistency in all your pages. Stick to one style and tone throughout all your writing.
- Provide the word count for each page. Many web developers know that 1,000-word pages get better SEO results than shorter 250-word pages.
- Send pictures separately so they maintain their integrity and don’t get lost in translation. Make sure every image is yours to use.
- Stick to your web developer deadlines as closely as possible to stay on track for the launch of your stunning new website.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.