Since your website doubles as an untiring brand ambassador, your content must always be fresh, engaging, and relevant. Peppering your pages with attention-grabbing and compelling content entices readers to browse your offerings and engage with your brand.
Your brand may suffer if your online presence stagnates and no longer resonates with your target audience. It may lead to low engagement and conversion, eroding your bottom line.
At Express Writers, our crack shot can breathe new life into your website by making the existing content more compelling, persuasive, and well-aligned with your marketing goals. Dig in as we share our top 8 signs your website is due for a content update.
Outdated Information
Do you add the year to your blog post titles? If so, have you updated them to read the year 2024? Now is the best time to spruce up your content, including updating the year, before the holidays kick off in earnest.
Blog posts with an updated year in the title command more attention
Including the current year in your headings helps build the reader’s trust. It reassures them the content is current and up to date. Retaining outdated information on the website can mislead visitors and harm your credibility.
Outdated information may also erode readers’ trust and dampen your brand authority. It also means a failed opportunity to portray current capabilities, offerings, and thought leadership. That may create the impression that you’re out of touch with the latest trends and innovations, dissuading prospects from engaging with your brand.
Dropping Traffic and Engagement
Does a cursory look at your analytics paint a dull picture? Dropping organic traffic and engagement may indicate that your website no longer resonates with your audience.
Audience interests and preferences change over time. You must adapt your content strategy to evolve along with the changing landscape. Visitors are unlikely to engage with your website if the content doesn’t align with their interests.
When information becomes stale, it loses its appeal. You’re likely to disappoint visitors searching for fresh, valuable information. They may quickly decamp to the competition, saddling you with a massive drop in organic traffic and engagement.
A content update shows that you’re attuned to your audience’s needs and helps you demonstrate thought leadership. It keeps your content fresh and engaging while encouraging repeat visits.
Poor Search Engine Rankings
While Google has been on a roll this year, there could be more to your poor search ranking than wild algorithm updates. See, Google is on a mission to connect web users with the most helpful, most relevant content. Did you know the top three sites on Google search results get over 54% of the search traffic?
Your website will likely get no visitors if it’s not the first page of the search results.
Google uses various metrics, including tracking user engagement metrics, to accomplish this feat.
If your content doesn’t resonate with the target audience, Google picks up on it. Consequently, your website may experience a dramatic drop from the top of the search engine results.
A content update may help your website demonstrate topical authority, match user intent, and capture the reader’s attention. If you do a meticulous job, you can regain your lost rankings and even outrank your most fierce competitors. Peppering your website with quality content also helps you build a healthy and natural backlink profile.
High Bounce Rates
If you notice a high bounce rate on your website, chances are your content doesn’t capture the reader’s interest. Bounce rate is a metric that captures the number of visitors leaving your website after viewing only one page.
Visitors will likely click away if the content doesn’t address their needs or fill their search query. Poorly written, difficult to read, and visually unappealing content is a sure turn-off.
When web visitors consistently click on your website only to quickly return to the search results, it hurts your search ranking. Google interprets such behavior as user dissatisfaction due to poor content, so your site isn’t worthy of a top spot in the search results.
Updating your content can help you reduce spiking bounce rates and entice visitors to linger on your website. It’s a proven way to enhance user experience, increase dwell time, and build subject matter expertise.
Low Click-Through Rates
When your content ranks high on the SERPs but the click-through rate is abysmal, you may need to refine your content. It indicates that you’re targeting and ranking for the right keywords, but your content doesn’t resonate with your target audience.
Featured snippets drive click-through rates.
Visitors can see your content on the search results but fail to click through to your website. Your content isn’t compelling enough to capture their interest and attention or lacks crucial elements.
It’s possible that your titles and meta descriptions aren’t compelling, descriptive, or relevant. Visitors won’t click on your content if these elements aren’t enticing or accurately reflect the page’s content.
Your click-through rate may also suffer if your pages lack or have poorly optimized snippets. Featured and rich snippets help your site stand out in the SERPs and attract clicks.
A content update can help you optimize these elements to help you capture more clicks and drive more visitors to your web pages.
You’re not Converting Leads
Are you driving thousands of visitors to your offers, but conversion is dismal at best? A low conversion rate may indicate a disconnect between your content and audience needs. Ideally, your content should drive visitors to fill out a form, join your mailing list, or purchase a product.
Website conversion rates in different verticals.
While the average website conversion rate is 2% to 5%, the rates vary wildly between industries. The best e-commerce sites convert 6.25% of their visitors, while top-tier financial websites have conversion rates of almost 25%. Typically, you should gauge your site’s performance against your industry’s rates.
A content update can help boost your conversion rates if they fall below the industry standards. Your conversion rates may suffer if you don’t have your buyer persona down to pat. A poorly designed buyer persona can lead you to create content that doesn’t address your target audience’s needs, pain points, and challenges.
Refining your buyer persona to reflect your audience’s desires and aspirations enables you to tighten your content strategy to align with them. You can then update your content to make it more compelling and persuasive. You can update weak and ineffective calls-to-action (CTA) and guide visitors to take specific actions.
You’re not Making Sales
Your website is in dire need of a content update if you’re not making sales. While several factors could be responsible for low sales, a poor content strategy is a likely culprit.
Your strategy must demonstrate a keen understanding of your audience and their buying journey. The use of a sales funnel lets you categorize buyers into buying stages and target each buyer stage with laser-targeted messages addressing their specific buying needs.
A content update can help you reconfigure your content to make it more sales-oriented without coming off as “salesy.” You can broaden your content strategy to target the five levels of awareness and ensure consistent sales.
Switching to this approach gives you an edge by capturing and nurturing prospects from the outset. It saves you the hassle of battling competitors for the small portion of the market ready to buy.
Your Pages aren’t Ranking
A 2023 study by Ahref found only 3.45% of the online content is visible in the search results. The shocking results mean that 96.55% of the internet content is invisible. Worse still, about 2% of the pages receive less than ten visitors monthly.
Over 96% of online content amounts to wasted efforts.
You should consider a content update if a significant portion of your web pages isn’t visible on the search results. A website audit can help you identify your poor performer for closer inspection. You can then zero in and address the most glaring problems likely to lead to poor ranking results. Your pages may rank poorly on the search results if they don’t match the search intent, target keywords with no search volume, or have no backlinks.
Working with an expert service can help you address these problems and increase your site’s online visibility while building brand authority.
Breathe New Life into Your Website with Write Express
Today’s online visitors are picky and short on time—you only have a short window to capture their attention and entice them to visit your website. The subject matter experts at Express Writers have mastered the art of crafting persuasive and compelling content. From blog posts to web content, email newsletters to white papers, our professional writers provide custom content that suits your needs. Contact us today, and we’ll help you create sizzling content that dazzles your readers and outpaces the competition.
Much like a creepy haunted house, bad copy is riddled with cobwebs, scary verbal arachnids and misplaced modifiers that leap at you from behind cracked doors.
This Halloween season, the last thing you want to do is scare away your precious readers with bad copy.
Instead of entertaining this horror show, focus on creating spook-tacularly engaging content this Halloween season and watch your readers flock to your site…like witches to the cauldron.
15 Ways To Get Your Readers To Engage On Your Content Like Witches With A Cauldron
1) Add some cackle to your copy
Humor is important – especially if you’re writing about a topic others may perceive as “boring.” By infusing an approachable sense of humor throughout your content, you make it approachable, engaging and more relatable than content written from a stiff-upper-lip perspective. Need help on being funny – check out CopyBlogger’s “How to be 20% Funnier Than you Really are” post.
Keep in mind, though, that being funny doesn’t mean being fake. When you try too hard to be hilarious, your audience is going to catch on. Instead of straining yourself in the name of hilarity, try simply pointing out the industry truths that nobody acknowledges or approaching your own confusion or difficulties with a light-hearted air. This will help your readers breathe a sigh of relief and think “Phew! She gets it!”
2) Information and interest and valuable content, that’s what good copy is made of
Why do you write the things you do? Because you’re bored? To prove something to your college English professor? To engage your readers with valuable content? That last one is more like it. In order to be valuable, though, your copy also needs to be informational and interesting. To ensure your content is meeting the bar, spend some time putting yourself in your readers’ shoes. What do they want to know about? What are they struggling with? What would be helpful to them? Answering these questions in your copy can ensure that it stays interesting and engaging for years to come.
3) Stay on this planet
Nobody wants to wade through dense analogies and when your readers need a roadmap to understand what the heck it is you’re getting at; you can bet that you’re going to lose a good deal of them. That said, it’s important to continue being relatable, even when you’re discussing a dense topic. One of the best ways to do this is to provide relatable analogies for complex ideas. To do this, think about something that all of your readers can relate to. The rental market, for example, or going to the grocery store, and use these commonplace topics to illustrate a dense idea like web hosting or coding. This will help your readers understand the ideas you’re presenting them, even if the topic is intricate.
4) Offer breaks
It’s tough and intimidating to confront a page filled with tiny, single-spaced text and no images, paragraphs or links. Somewhere deep down, smart readers are still like little kids who love pictures, text-sparse pages and sensory detail. And as they should: content written in this fashion is much more interesting and useful than text-only pages that require a magnifying glass to dissect. Because of this, it’s wise to give your readers small breaks within your copy so that they don’t feel overwhelmed. Break text into small chunks, use headers and sub headers and consider serializing posts about dense topics into mini-series. This helps make your copy more approachable and keeps your readers interested.
To take this a step further, consider branching out into different types of content. If you only write blog posts, consider offering a podcast or two or creating an infographic. In addition to keeping your text engaging and interesting, this also serves to help you meet your fans on the platform of their choice and gives readers even more ways to interact with your copy.
5) Incorporate pictures into the brew
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a great infographic, video or meme is worth ten times that, at least. If your story is ho-hum – the ins and outs of a new platform, for example – consider resorting to visuals to tell it in a stylish and intriguing manner. Never worked with any of these content types before? No worries, it’s easier now than ever to create them on your own.
6) Interview like-minded guys and ghouls
By bringing industry experts into your site, you do several things: first of all, you create a larger following by bringing your guest’s following to your blog. Secondly, you pique your fans’ interest by showcasing new views and adding some variety to your posts. Plus, when you allow your site to become known as a melting pot of ideas, innovation and creativity, you draw people who want to engage with you, which is great for building a community of other writers while also expanding your reader base.
7) Give your fans a fright…in a good way!
Not a literal fright…again, your copy shouldn’t be scary. While we don’t want you driving your fans toward the hills with poorly constructed web copy, we do want you to use specific, hardcore statistics to shock your readers. Even the most engaging topic in the world risks feeling a little dry if readers don’t have anything to sink their teeth into. Take, for example, social media marketing. When I say “social media marketing is an effective way to draw more leads” you probably nod your head, eyes wide, and think “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” When I tell you, however, that LinkedIn generates new leads at a rate 277% higher than any other social media platform, your eyes probably pop open for a different reason. The latter is interesting, the former – not so much.
8) Survey your fans
Want to know what your fans would find interesting? Ask them! Brainstorm a series of topics with your team and ask your fans which of the batch they would prefer to hear more about. Alternately, ask them how they feel about every blog you write–and make sure you’ve addressed all their questions–by placing a comment at the end that says something like “What’s your question? Let me know in the comments!” Take Tim Ferriss’s blog, for example, which does just that.
9) Be candid
There is nothing more appealing in a writer than the willingness to be candid. Candor helps readers see the entire story – not just the shiny face most people would like to present. And while this may seem counterintuitive (“Why would I want to show people my failures?” you ask), it can actually help your readers bond to your brand and have a fuller understanding of the topic. Plus, if you’re selling the illusion that things go off seamlessly every time, you’re selling fake goods. Instead, bring a certain amount of candor into your writing. Make a big mistake lately? Things went a different direction than you thought they would? Talk about it! Fans will learn more from you and they’ll appreciate your willingness to be honest and transparent.
10) Do away with babble
You write differently than you speak, don’t you? It’s okay. We all do it. But the key to creating more interesting content is to eliminate babble and write the way you speak. Chances are, when readers come to your site, they do so hoping for genuine advice, not to feel like they’ve been run over by a semi loaded down with confusing phrases, wacky metaphors and long-winded explanations. For some sound advice on being a better writer, check out the Dilbert Blog’s piece titled “The day you Became a Better Writer.” There you have it – pare your sentences, eliminate the things that aren’t necessary and clarify, clarify, clarify – your readers will thank you!
11) Be helpful to avoid being boring
Wallpaper – it’s often thought of as one of the most boring substances in the world, right? Until, that is, someone needs to learn how to tear it off or put it up and they find a detailed blog post in which you’ve addressed those exact topics. When you set out to write this season, remember the wallpaper example – helpful things aren’t at risk of being boring. By writing content that solves a problem for your reader or helps him or her answer a question, you land solidly in the “This is so interesting!” category.
12) Keep up with the times
By keeping an eye on current events and trends in your industry, you can provide your readers with content that is not only useful but is also relevant to today’s climate. This is a big deal. In addition to ensuring that your content is interesting, keeping up-to-date on social media and news can help you harvest ideas for articles and interact effectively with other people in your industry.
13) Use Quora
Quora is a great reference for people who want to create engaging content. Quora is a user-generated question site that is literally filled to bursting with questions about everything from relationships to coding. Spend some time combing through the archives and you’ll come away ripe with content ideas and, more importantly, with a genuine understanding about the types of questions, issues and hurdles your target audience is struggling with. To make the most out of Quora, jump right in and ask and answer questions. This will serve to deepen your understanding and also to help establish you as an expert in your industry, which will do great things for your traffic and readership numbers.
14) Write directly to one person
When you sit down to write a blog post, who are you writing to? Sure, we know there’s an “Audience” out there but it’s a little hard to write well to 1,000 people, isn’t it? Instead, focus on writing to one person. One person from that vast, faceless “audience”, that’s it. Ideally, you should know who this person is, whether it’s a man or a woman, how old he or she is, where he or she lives, etc. etc. Creating a target persona is the best way to glean this information. By using words like “you” and “your,” you can pull your audience into the content with you and create posts that they will find genuinely interesting and applicable.
15) Be confident
In writing as in life, confidence pays. When you set out to create content your readers will love, one of the best things you can do for both yourself and for them is to be confident. Stand by your voice. Don’t say things like “in my opinion” or “possibly”. This is weak language that makes you seem doubtful and uncertain. Plus, the reader already knows it’s your opinion! Don’t stress about the people who (inevitably) won’t like your content and, most of all, keep creating! You’re the expert here and when you stand by your knowledge, your voice and your writing, you’ll be in a better position to create engaging content time and time again. What’s more, you’ll also be a source of inspiration to readers who may be trying to find their voice!
Conclusion
There you have it – our 15 best tips for spooky good content this Halloween. So go ahead, stop scaring your audience with bad web copy and, instead, give them something frightfully good to sink their teeth into!
By now, you’ve probably read (skimmed, noticed, you-name-it, we know you saw it…*insert wink face*) all our articles about how to create compelling content and are well on your way to changing your 2014 content strategy.
As you make your changes, you are probably wondering if content truly is that important and if you will see any changes within your company. Well, we can tell you that it really is important and you will begin to see amazing changes soon. This article will discuss a few of the benefits you can expect when you begin to publish quality content.
First, Let’s Start with a Little Testimony From Our Books. At Express Writers, we truly know what good content means and the power of content that’s not just written for rankings. We upgraded our content campaign in 2013, invested some of our best writers in writing our content campaigns, utilized tools like editorial calendars, planned out seasonal topics, and switched from keyword focus to reader, tone, voice, structure and research. It was a big switch, and it has boosted our return by over 200%. Google ranks our posts better–even though they are NOT centered around keywords; we have received more connections, followers, and subscribers for our published content (from newsletter campaigns to guest blog RSS) than we ever have before; and people like what they read and are more quick to look to our team for their own quality content. It’s the truth: investing in your content–putting real elbow grease and investment–will bring you return.
Now that you have read our little testimonial, it is time to look at changes you will see once you start publishing your quality and fascinating content:
1. You Will Make and Save Money
Once you begin to write and publish your stellar content for the world to see, you will begin to see something amazing in your budget and bank account. How so? Well, by writing quality content, you will not have to spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing campaigns. This may not seem true at first, especially if you hire a copywriter; but look at it as a whole:
Is what you are spending on the copywriter for a handful of pieces more or less, than how much you spent on other forms of continual advertising?
You do not have to pay the copywriter continually in order to use their work; once they’ve finished it, it is yours for good.
You will find that paying a copywriter to create great copy will save you money in the long run. You don’t have to keep paying a copywriter in order to use the content they created for you and, in fact, you are able to reuse and make your own changes to the material when you are ready for a change. Quality content will bring in more money from sales as your generic advertisement route will not cut it anymore; sales are relying heavily on content marketing. Once you have made the change, you will begin to reap the benefits financially, which is pretty exciting if you ask us!
2. It Saves Time
Yes, it does! Once you have your content written, you are done with your content marketing campaign. You do not have to keep going back to make changes to fit with seasons or focus on advertisement campaigns that will not bring in the revenue your business needs. By creating great e-newsletter content, great PRs, web content, and blogs, you will find that you have more time to focus on getting to know your customers and working to keep them as part of your business for a long time. Compelling content saves you from having constantly to change a content strategy that isn’t working anymore. This is why we say quality is of the upmost importance. Don’t slack off.
3. Become the Authority in Your Field
By publishing consistent, compelling content, you will be deemed an authority in your product or service area. People are more willing to trust someone who writes consistently and knowledgeably; Google will rank you higher the more you publish with their Google Authorship if your blogs are published frequently and with high quality. You will find more people trusting you as a source over your competitors and this will bring in more customers or more people looking to you for information. You may even find that competitors will come to you as a resource, trying to learn from the compelling content sensei you’ve become.
4. Traffic + Comments
Simply put, quality content increases the traffic to your site. People are not going to share your site if it is drab and filled with uninteresting content. Do not spend all your time focusing on whether or not your keywords are perfect; spice up your content and make it readable. Intriguing, readable content will guarantee more shares on social media and this is how the traffic will increase to and around your site. The more traffic, the better ranked you will become. In addition, it will just feel great to look at your statistics and see the traffic numbers rocketing from minimal to viral in a snap! Comments on your blog postings are another great benefit of writing fascinating content. Readers and customers will be more willing to discuss information with a business that is open minded and knowledgeable.
5. Customer Interest and Support
Quality, compelling content will help you create a great customer base of interested clientele. According to Social Media Today, customers are more willing to support the business if the business’s content is exciting and from the heart, they will share any information regarding the business with colleagues, family, and friends. People will even share it on their social media platform, helping to increase the audience your business wants to reach.
There are many other ways in which gripping content helps with customers such as:
Learning More About Your Customers. Customers who are truly interested in your product due to your content will give you great ideas on how to tweak services provided. You will find customers to be more willing to give you tips and tricks on how to beat the competition as well as telling you what they expect from your company. Customers are your best resource when it comes to slamming the competition. Because of this, you will be able to gain useful information that will prove effective when setting up winning strategies.
Creating Lasting Relationships with Customers. If you continually post great information and content, customers will stay with you and stay in contact for a long time. They will be committed to your business and will prove to be great forms of advertisement when they know of someone who is looking for a business such as yours. Do not forget that quality content is absolutely necessary when it comes to customer relations.
Bringing in New and Unexpected Customers. You may be surprised when one day you begin to realize you are reaching customers you did not expect to reach. That is a huge benefit of quality content. A wider range of people will notice content that is captivating and you will be able to create interest in more diverse companies or communities. Reaching different groups will be great for your business and be another advertisement point when people begin researching your services.
6. Your Designers Will Thank You
Designers are great at making an awesome looking website and creating something that works wonderfully, but many are not up to the task of creating content. You may think it is part of what they do, but designers will tell you that they would rather design than write. Hiring a copywriter to write compelling content will take all that stress and worry off your designers and you will find that their productivity is greater than before. They no longer have to worry about writing content thus making them more apt to stay with your business and not burn out. You will also find that you are able to recruit great employees. Stellar writers and designers will not apply to a business with boring content, but if your site looks inviting and is written in an engaging manner, you will begin to see professional people taking interest in working for or with your business. Having great employees will help your business become highly successful.
7. Your Competition Will Start Losing to You
Guess what? Fascinating content will help you beat your competition into the ground! That very real struggle of trying to win will become easier the more you publish great material. Customers and search engines will take notice that your information is more interesting and valuable than your competitors, leaving your competitors in the dust. They may be focusing too much on what kind of content to publish or using antiquated methods of outreach, giving you a great opportunity to outshine them, so start creating interesting content and keep creating it! Take a lesson from what your competitors are doing and tweak it to make it a tremendous success for you.
8. You Will Go Viral
Achievement unlocked! Quality, compelling content is the key to going viral. Think about the kind of content you share on your social media site. Is it fascinating? Is the quality amazing? You should be writing the kind of content you would share on your personal social media site. If you write something you would never share, the likelihood that others won’t share it is high. As we keep saying, do not slack off when it comes to writing your content. Your unique, captivating content will help you stand out in the overabundance of articles and web copy out there. By having a unique style and “voice” you will find that more of your content will go viral after the initial viral post. Your blog and site will gain new readers each and every time you go viral. Soon, you will be doing that happy dance of achievement as your posts continue to be viewed by hundreds of people, all because those posts are quality, unique, and sound like you.
9. Great Content Grows with Technology
Technology will never outgrow quality content; that much is clear from Google’s new algorithms. Your compelling material will grow with the available technology and you can use content you already have by implementing any changes that come out from Google or other search engines. You will find that your content will always be excellent and able to be used at any time. That is one of the great things about creating great web content – you can reuse it! Sometimes, all you will have to do is make minor tweaks and edits. Of course, it is always great to refresh your material so it does not always sound the same, but it is easy to use existing content on your site and rewrite it in a new and compelling way. This saves you significant amounts of time and money.
10. You Will Maintain Your Reputation
Have your products and services received high marks from customers? Yes? That’s fantastic! Now, you want to keep those high marks and show potential clients that you are as great as the reviews say. Quality content does just that, it shows potential clients that those high marks are not just from your mom and a few friends. Great content makes you look professional and knowledgeable, leading to a lasting good reputation and more sales for your business. Your reputation will plummet if you post boring material, start writing that great content and keep your already excellent reputation.
You Will Reap Many Benefits When You Use Compelling Content!
The benefits of quality content marketing will tremendously help your business generate more leads, make more revenue, and become an authority in your field. People will flock from all over to a site that has expertly crafted content and are more than willing to offer support to companies. By focusing strongly on great content, your business will boom, and as we said in the beginning go from boo to woo quickly!
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