Your website’s visual design plays an important role in getting visitors to stay on your website and read your content, and is therefore a primary concern when designing your website.
Once you have an appealing design that entices your visitor to trust you and engage with your website, your next priority is to write good content they’ll love.
If your content falls short of your visitor’s expectations, you will lose them.
They will move on to another website in search of the content they hoped they’d get from your website.
And you may never get them back — especially if your competitors have amazing content on their websites.
Write good content to attract and retain website visitors
So what are the important things to know about creating great content?
The first thing to know is that your content should be about your visitor, not about you.
Nobody likes a person at a party who does nothing but talk about themselves, especially if they’re busy bragging in an attempt to impress you.
The way to get someone to like you at a party is to be interested in them, and have a two-way conversation about the things they find interesting.
Your website is no different.
To impress your website visitors, make sure your content is written for your target customers and has V-A-L-U-E.
This is an acronym for Valuable – Aligned – Lively – Useful – Easy to Consume.
Let’s take a look at each of these V-A-L-U-E attributes:
Good content is VALUABLE to your reader
The reader should feel they have gotten something that is valuable to them in return for the time they put into reading your content.
Going all out just promoting yourself is not valuable from the viewpoint of your reader.
Your visitors are looking for information that helps them understand things better so they can make better decisions and be more effective at achieving results when taking action.
Give them content that meets this need, and they’ll value it.
Good content is ALIGNED
Your content should be aligned with your brand, your products/services, the culture of your business, etc.
It should feel like a unified whole, each piece of content supporting and aligning with what your business is all about.
That includes aligning your headlines with the text in your paragraphs (i.e. no bait-and-switch headlines).
It means aligning your graphics with your message (not including random stock images just to fill space).
It means being on-topic and presenting the information the reader expects to find on your website.
Good content is LIVELY, not dull and boring
Write for everyday people, not for academics or robots.
People like to be entertained. They like to be engaged with relatable stories.
They like to be emotionally involved.
This doesn’t mean your content needs to read like a long drawn-out storybook. But it should be interesting and entertaining rather than just a dry information dump.
Don’t make your content dull and boring — put some life into it.
Good content is USEFUL (to the reader)
Your website visitors are there because they are searching for information and solutions.
They’re not looking for fluff or feel-good content — they’re looking for something they can actually use to make their life better in some way.
Readers will find your content useful if it meets these criteria:
- Helps them understand a real problem they are experiencing
- Answers their questions and clears up any confusions they may have
- Offers actionable information that is easy to understand and implement
- Clearly identifies the benefits and outcomes that can be expected with your solutions and your products/services
Good content is EASY TO CONSUME
Like many things in this world, your readers prefer to take the path of least resistance.
They don’t want to work hard to read and understand whatever you are presenting to them.
This is why video is so popular these days — it’s easy to consume (it’s easier to watch video and learn visually than to read dense text).
People do like to read, and will read your content if you make it worth their while. But the more difficult you make it to read, the more likely they are to give up and move on.
Therefore, use simple sentences. Avoid big words they’re not likely to understand.
Add space between lines and between paragraphs to loosen up the text and make it look less dense. Use short paragraphs (no more than 1-3 sentences per paragraph as a general rule).
Use a big font (a font size of 16 pixels is considered the minimum size for easy reading on a website). Use a font color that contrasts well with the background, so the reader doesn’t have to strain to make out the letters.
Add images and illustrations that help the reader understand what they’re reading.
In short, do anything you can to make your content as easy as possible for the reader to absorb and understand.
For more detailed information about what specifically to put on each page of your website, browse through our article: How to Create an Amazing Website that Actually Gets Results
Improving the content on your website and aligning it with what your visitors want will help your website be successful. It will attract visitors and get them interested in your business and your products/services.
