Good content is the heart and soul of your website’s success, so if you’re not getting the number of visitors you’re after or no one is staying long enough to see how great you are, perhaps you need to take a step back. Summon some power tools hidden at the back of your head that can boost your website’s quality and leads without spending an extra cent. For more on that, Cate Caruth of Creative Words kindly shared some of her top tips for creating an engaging website.
All the tips included are part of a highly informative presentation given by Cate Caruth in a spectacular presentation on The Business Amplifier podcast. For more of Cate’s wisdom, check out Creative Words.
1. Know your audience
Knowing your audience is one of the most important aspects of any business, from selling an orange all the way to providing multi-million dollar consultancy services. The problem is, however, that a lot of business owners get caught up with what they do that they forget the person on the other end. For that, there’s one very descriptive piece of advice: Don’t “we” all over your website.
Most businesses fall into the trap of thinking that they need to tell the audience outright every single detail about themselves and what they can do. It’s appealing for a gardening firm to slap their new x345 lawnmower all over their website, but what audiences really care about is what their life will be like when they use your service.
This is where one of the biggest pitfalls of any business owner’s mindset comes in: “My target audience is everyone.” Unfortunately, if you try to sell to everyone, you will end up not selling to anyone. You have to know your audience first and then find your “ideal client” that you can focus all your energy and resources on getting.
Sometimes you have to wear different hats for different audiences. For example, someone who is both a coach and a speaker can’t use the same tone and metaphorical hat when they speak to the “corporate” audience as they do when they coach the “individuals” audience. In each case, the style has to be different and requires an integral question of, “Who is this for and what is it exactly that they need at this point in their journey?”
The fact of the matter is that prospects and audiences go through several mental stages before buying a product or service. There is always the “open query” stage where they think, “Hmm, who can help me with X?” but at that point, they don’t know exactly what they want. However, a couple of meetings and some details can drastically shift them to a whole new stage of actual interest.
This awareness of the start of the customer journey – from thinking they might need you to becoming an actual client – is a cornerstone of marketing and can never be overlooked. A client-business relationship is sometimes no different from an actual relationship where one needs to know and care about the needs and wants of the other and make them feel secure and confident that they will be fulfilled.
A tricky element of getting to the actual client stage, however, is keeping the client. This is where you have to give the customer such a great experience that they continue being your customer all the way to the point in their journey where they no longer need your services. That point could be days, months or even years away, but most importantly, you have to keep things on the same level of quality, if not an ascending level.
How do I find my ideal client?
Going back to the concept of the ideal client, it doesn’t mean limiting who you can sell to, but rather giving your marketing some focus. If you’re trying to sell to everybody, how many landing pages and web pages for how many different industries will you be willing to put up?
Speaking to your audience will always come mainly through your website, so you have several options of doing so: service pages, blog posts, etc. If you want to appeal to a wide variety of different industries, then you have to address them directly.
For example, if you’re offering translation services, you might want to have a service page for “Literary translation”, one for “Multimedia translation”, one for “Legal translation” and so on. It’s always best to focus your marketing, so if you want to appeal to everyone, address them specifically.
Good copywriting really can save you and your audience so much time. Perhaps you’re a fitness equipment business and one visitor just wants to buy a treadmill; they shouldn’t have to go through loads of info and content about dumbbells and kettlebells to get to what they want. But, if you want your visitors to see your whole range, then the homepage is your secret weapon.
The whole point of a homepage is to keep the visitors on your website looking longer and further. For one, that helps with SEO because Google looks at how long people stay on your site. But, there’s a method to the madness when it comes to homepages and that’s breaking them up into sections.
The top section of your homepage needs to directly address your audience, acknowledge their problem, and tell them how you can help them with it.
Then, in the next section, you need proof. Proof comes in the form of client testimonials and relevant reviews, and this is one of the biggest mistakes people make. So many websites keep their testimonials at the bottom, or on a separate page.
Next, you want to add your services and it would be ideal if you can segment them by industry, too.
Lastly, at the bottom of your homepage, you want to answer the question of, “Is this the right person for me?” Basically, you tell your audience who you are and how you’re just the company they’ve been looking for. It wraps up their journey with a nice bow and gives you exactly what you need: a potential customer.
2. Be consistent
The second major element you need to double your leads is consistency. Consistency with your content means everything has to be up to date. Often you see websites with a blog page consisting of a couple of very outdated blog posts and that’s it. Something like this sends unfortunate signals to a visitor who might think, “Oh, this business doesn’t finish what it started,” or “Oh, this must mean they’re not in business anymore.”
There are simple ways to send the message of being up to date. You can always revisit old blog posts and edit them, or you can even redate them while you add more posts. If you really don’t have time to invest in more blogs (or budget to put into getting a copywriter on the case) take the blog page down.
Don’t confuse consistency with a specific frequency either. Just because you’ve read that you ought to be posting X amount of times a day/week/month or you need to be on social media X amount of days a week, don’t get overwhelmed. As long as you’re posting and keeping content updated to a timescale that is right for you, you should be good to go. A monthly blog, done well is much better than a few blogs in a week, then nothing for a year. You need to have content flowing.
Pro Tip: Repurpose your content
The journey of your website’s writing should never end at the level of posting. You can always structure your content in a way that allows you to mould and transform it into different kinds of content.
For instance, you can have four or five headlines for your blog post because these headlines can be used as four or five social media posts, and then on those social media posts, you can say, “If you want to learn more, read my blog,” and now you have an instant website visitor.
You could always choose the topics of your content in terms of their versatility to repurpose. A “top tips” type of blog can be turned into a downloadable ebook which can then become a squeeze page that gives you access to contact information, and this in turn makes it even easier to plug your newsletter. That’s four types of content from one topic.
This goes for any article or blog post topic you may have. An article can easily be turned into a video or a podcast (check out our Business Amplifier podcast, by the way) or even a 10-minute presentation for a networking event. All of a sudden, a simple article has opened up a whole field of possibilities.
3. Don’t wait for it to be perfect
Business is just like anything else in the world: it will never be absolutely perfect. So, the important thing is just to start. If you’re waiting to have 40 pages ready before you launch your website, thinking it has to be perfect from the get-go, you will always be stuck waiting.
The important thing is to have something out there that’s published so that people can take note of you. That could be a web page or two, a video, an article, etc. Don’t worry about having every aspect of your website ready. You can always start with a homepage, then a few service pages, then slowly build the site up and watch it grow.
Pro Tip: Edit your content as you move forward
For bonus SEO optimisation, you should always go back to old articles or posts and see what you can tweak. So many websites have ancient content on there that Google will eventually just stop caring about, even if it’s really good, so why waste it?
You can make massive SEO gains by keeping that content up to date, even if you had published it when it needed cleanups. This is especially important in our ever-changing world where content needs to be correct. For example, if a certain law changes and you have an article written about the old one, you need to update it to suit the new changes.
Think of it this way: if you were doing one blog post a month for three years, that’s 36 blog posts on your site. How many people will actually read blog post #1 after that third year? So, what you could do is repurpose article 1 and turn it into article 37; Google will recognise the update, and you ultimately get more readers.
Can’t I just use AI for all my content?
In theory, AI is a good tool to use to help with your content but abdicate to it. AI just follows formulas and changes constantly, so its reliability is very much a point of debate and human intervention is needed.
More importantly, AI cannot think, it can only regurgitate. This means that at the end of the day, AI gathers bits and pieces from other sources and just sticks them together to create content; that’s not good. What AI is really good for, though, is ideation.
Because AI sifts through countless data on the internet, it can give you near-limitless ideas for your content. Not only that but it can also help you come up with a formula for what you need. For example, if you need to write a landing page but you’re not sure how that’s written; ask AI to show you five high-performing examples and then use those to inform your own design and content.
Bonus Tip: Ask AI to write something you really, really understand
Another critical aspect of AI is that it thinks all data on the internet is true. So, if you’re not knowledgeable enough about the subject AI is writing for you, you may not recognise if it’s wrong.
An easy way to test this is to test AI on subjects you’re already really familiar with. Ask AI for your most ‘nerdy’ subject and see what comes back. That gives you an idea of the scale of the challenge. False information has been the plague of the internet for ages (how many quotes from Nelson Mandela and Einstein are on the internet that they never actually said?), and if you keep posting AI content that’s false, it will only perpetuate the problem.
Another problem with AI slowly creeping up on everyone is copyright issues. After all, since AI just regurgitates other people’s content, there are cases popping up in courts about AI and intellectual property. This means that all of a sudden, there may be a law requiring all AI-written content to be labelled as such and if you can’t remember what content on your site is AI-written and what isn’t, you will be in a world of trouble.
Even for SEO purposes, it’s best to use AI as a helping hand rather than a writing hand, so to speak. It makes Google happy, you don’t have to worry about your pages being buried in the dreaded pages 2 and up of Google search results, and you end up having genuinely helpful content on your site that people can come back to.
Takeaway: Just start
If you’re not sure where to go on your content journey, you really just need to start. Whether you want to do a homepage, an ebook, a newsletter, social media posts, or videos, you just need to start and the rest will follow suit. Remember, it’s all about knowing your audience, being consistent, and never waiting for it to be perfect.
Last Updated on December 20, 2024
