You know how great your business is. You probably think you cannot say enough good things about what you do. But you can.
We love your passion, but when it comes to telling your story on the web, you have only a small window of time to capture your visitors’ attention. If your website has too much content, you could be discouraging people from reading any of it.
To write web content that will get read, break up text into manageable, easily digestible sections with these tips:
Write Short Paragraphs
You probably learned in English 101 that every paragraph should contain 4-6 sentences. The first sentence should be a topic sentence, followed by a few supporting sentences to uphold the idea of the first sentence, and wrapped up with a concluding sentence that brings it all together and starts the transition to the next paragraph.
This is irrelevant on the web.
Short paragraphs look easier to tackle and keep visitors reading.
Get to the Point
Tell the story and drop the mic.
Headings = Good
* Headings provide a roadmap of your content. Visitors skimming your site will use headings as cues to determine what you offer and decide if they will keep reading.
* Headings have SEO value. Using keywords in your headings not only tells site visitors what you do, search engines put more weight on words in a heading font. Maximize this opportunity to optimize your content for people AND robots.
Use Numbered Lists and Bullet Points
Lists are eye-catching and are especially great for communicating benefits. Benefits of lists include:
- Easy to read
- No need to write in complete sentences
- Stand out on the page
Use Bold and Italics
You’ll catch readers’ eyes by pulling out important points with bold fonts for main ideas or italics to introduce lists.
See what I did there? It's effective!
Provide Additional Value with a CTA
All content is 10x better when it has a next step, whether that's a CTA for an event, a meeting to get more information, or one that provides an additional resource related to the content you just offered. Take this CTA right here, for example. This may be something you're interested in checking out next. Or maybe you want to check out our resource page about all things content marketing. As such, these kinds of things provide value to your readers that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Written by Lindsey Bowshier
Lindsey is the President of Tribute Media. Her degree is in English and Communication with an emphasis in Journalism, her background is in copywriting and content marketing, and she's had pretty much every job at Tribute Media since she joined the agency in 2014. Outside of work, Lindsey participates in a "super-cool-not-at-all-nerdy" writing group. Her favorite writer is Dorothy Parker.
