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8 Signs Your Website Badly Needs a Content Update

February 15, 2024 by Adam Oakley

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 Outdated Information Do you add the year to your blog post titles?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 Retaining outdated information on the website can mislead visitors and harm your credibility. Outdated information may also erode readers’ trust and dampen your brand authority.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 … Read more

15 Spook-Tacular Ways to Create Engaging, Tractionable Content

June 19, 2024October 29, 2015 by Adam Oakley

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 … Read more

From Boo to Woo: 10 Benefits of Publishing Compelling Content

January 1, 2021April 4, 2014 by Adam Oakley

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 … Read more