How to Make Your Website Content Better: 15 Ways

Great content is the lifeblood of every website. It helps you rank higher in search engines and bring new eyes to your landing pages.

Here are some tips on how you can make your content more appealing especially for users who are only finding your posts for the first time.

1. Optimize for a Keyword

Use an SEO keyword tool to discover keywords that you could target. Be sure to add them in your title, metadata, and headings as well. You should also use these keywords organically — you don’t want to force keywords where they don’t fit.

To determine which keyword to optimize your content with, use a tool like Ahrefs to generate ideas and suggestions from your initial keyword. From here, you can determine which among the keywords have:

• Low organic competition, which means ranking for that keyword is EASIER
• High monthly searches. That means more people will see and click on your page if you rank on top of organic search for this keyword

Focus on these metrics so you can find the best keyword to use for your content.

2. Make Your Titles Click-Worthy

Your titles should catch your audience’s full attention. One way to do that is by using titles that make it impossible for users to click other posts. 

Your titles should meet the following criteria:

• It should state what is promised in the article. NEVER go for sensationalized, click-baity titles.
• Make your audience care by addressing the benefit of reading the article, i.e. x Ways to Lose 10 Pounds in 14 Days Without Exercise.
• Leverage on scarcity and tap on your reader’s FOMO, i.e.  Exclusive Content Marketing Formula Guide [FREE for 1st 50 SIGN-UPS!]
• Keep the title under 60 characters so it won’t show truncated on Google search results.

3. Identify Your Target Audience

If you know who your target audience is, you can adjust your content to meet their expectations. Think about your audience’s comprehension level, age group, skill level, and similar factors.

Most importantly, you must determine their pain points regarding your topic. You show empathy to their plight by addressing these issues in your content. Tell stories or draw inspiration from real-life to illustrate your points and engage with readers at a much deeper level.

4. Improve Blog Intro

You need to get a user’s attention the moment they land on your page. Having a great title helps. But if you want them to continue reading, your intro should be just as compelling.

Think of how newspapers work. Just by reading the first few lines of an article, you already have a good idea of what it’s all about. The intro should address the 4 Ws (what, why, when, where) and 1 H (how). Your answers to these questions will make your audience and invigorate them to read the rest.

5. Update Your Post With the Latest Information

Users want the latest information. So if you’re citing studies, statistics, product details, or anything newsworthy, make sure that you have the most recent data to back it all up.

This is true with evergreen content. It’s a type of content that remains relevant through the years. However, some things change over time, and it could impact the relevance of your content – it could be sharing outdated information that’s no longer true nowadays. Therefore you need to update evergreen content to remain useful for readers.

Another type of content you need to update is listicles with years indicated in the title, i.e. 10 Tools that Every Marketer Should Use in 2020. Aside from updating the year in the title, you need to:

• add new tools
• remove tools in your list that no longer work
• rewrite some of the tools in the list with new features.

6. Answer Questions People Are Asking About the Topic

If you want your site traffic to grow, then you need to provide answers to questions that people search for. 

If you’re unsure what people look for online, you can use tools like Answer the Public. This tool shows you search terms that people use to find answers online based on your target keyword or niche.

If Answer the Public isn’t enough, you could also use Quora to unearth more questions about your topic.

The great thing about this platform is that most questions already have answers, which cuts down your research time. Just read the best answers and synthesize them together before including them in your article.

7. Fix Grammar Issues

Bad grammar turns people off. And it makes it easier for them to distrust anything you say. So before you publish your post, you better make sure that there are no grammatical (and factual) errors in your content.

It’s only a way to show Google that you’re a trusted source about a topic. Having lots of grammar errors in your piece makes it harder for people to read it, which could affect how Google perceives your article.

To ensure that your writing is always top-notch, use the Grammarly Chrome extension. It detects the errors as you type so you can catch these errors and make the corrections on the go. 

8. Add Unique Images and Screenshots

Text that goes on forever is hard on the eyes. So no matter how informative your content is, without images, then users will stop reading and click away. 

It’s easy to get a PC or MacBook screenshot using the right software. Adding screenshots and other forms of visual content will make your articles and blogs easier to read.

Make sure you can use them without getting sued. Here are some great sites to get free images that have a license permitting anyone:

• Pixabay
• Pexels
• Unsplash
• Shopify Burst

9. Embed Video

In some instances, it’s a great idea to include videos in your posts. This is especially true if words aren’t enough to convey what you’re trying to say. 

When planning to create videos, here are statistics conducted by Biteable on what experiences marketers have with this type of content:

• 74% of marketers say video has a better ROI than static imagery
• YouTube has the best ROI for video content, followed by Facebook and Instagram
• 81% of marketers say their videos perform better with music
• 66% of marketers say their videos perform better with a voiceover
• 78% of marketers say their videos perform better with less text

For those without any video content experience, you can start by using Lumen5 or InVideo. Both allow you to convert your blog posts into short videos that you can embed on your post or share on social media.

10. Format Content Correctly

How you format your content will have an impact on your audience’s overall experience. Plus, it will also improve your SEO. 

Use headings, subheadings, bullet points, font styles (bold, italic, etc.) as needed to make your posts easier to read.

Other tips include:

• Mention your target keyword in your meta title, subheadings, and the first 100 words of the article.
• Link to other related pages within the site to help increase the content’s relevance about the topic in the eyes of Google.
• Link to useful pages from non-competing sites.
• Add descriptive alt text on all your images. If you can include your keyword there, the better.

11. Improve Page Speed

The faster a page loads, the better it is for search engines and users. 

Brad Hanks, formerly a B2B SaaS consultant and current Head of Growth at CloudApp, suggests using Google PageSpeed Insights to find out how fast your page loads. “Just go to the site and enter your domain URL”, Hanks suggests. “You will also see other factors that are keeping your site loading faster.”

Even with this information about your site’s speed and performance, making the necessary improvements would be very difficult to do on your own unless you are a site developer. 

But for starters, you can install a caching plugin (if you’re using WordPress). Tools like W3 Total Cache (free) and WP Rocket (paid) will help fix some of the basic issues related to site speed.

Another tool you need to install on your WP site is an image compressor like ShortPixel. Images take up a lot of time to load especially if the file size is huge. Using this plugin decreases the file size without compromising the quality.

12. Link to Internal Pages

When you link to internal pages, users will find it easier to find related content on your website. And again, this will be better for your site’s SEO. So if you have pages that don’t get as much traffic, it’s a good idea to link back to them for exposure.

A great concept of internal linking in action is content silos. These are pages on a site about the same topic that link together. Each silo should be about a specific topic in your niche. For example, if your site is about basketball shoes, one silo could be about Nike, the other could be adidas, and so on.

Content silos not only make delivering information to visitors easier too since it’ll take them one click to move to another page in your site. They also help improve your authority and make your pages rank higher on Google.

13. Use Bucket Brigades

To simplify, a bucket brigade is a writing technique where you add words or phrases that add conversational value.

Here’s the truth:

Bucket brigades keep users engaged and act as a natural break between paragraphs. In this context, the line “Here’s the truth:” acts as a bucket brigade.

14. Link Out to Authoritative Websites

Linking to high-authority sites gives you credibility. It also helps your readers to verify the information you’re providing.

Some would think that linking away from your site is a bad thing because visitors will bounce away from your site. However, you have to think of your readers. If you want to deliver them the best information especially if it’s not available on your site, you must link out to other sites provided that they’re not your direct competitors.

15. Set a Relevant Call-to-Action (CTA) at the End

After users read your post, you need to indicate what you want them to do next? Should they read another post? Buy a product? Let them know.

Here are a few tips to make more people click on your CTAs:

• Use buttons instead of anchor text for your links.
• Change the size of the button to make it more visible to visitors.
• Change the color that is in contrast with your site’s theme to catch their attention much easier.
• Use the same CTA all over the page multiple times to further increase visibility.