Top Tips for Compelling Site Content

Many website owners get stuck for ideas as to how to keep the content on their site not only fresh and up to date, but also content that’s compelling, keeps visitors on their site and stops them surfing away to their competitors.

To help with this dilemma, here are some ideas that aren’t necessarily new, but are easy to apply to your website. They’ll help to attract visitors to your website and keep them on it once they’ve clicked on to it from the search engines or from a link.

1. Site Layout
How you lay out your content for visitors is as important as the content itself. Don’t try to cram as many products or services as you can onto a few pages, but give each product or product category its own page, the same with any services you provide. This way not only are your offerings clearly distinguishable, but you can optimise the individual pages for appropriate keywords. The more you separate out your products and services the easier your site will be to optimise, target your keywords and enable you to develop several content pages around a subject or product area. Don’t forget that any web page is a potential entry point for visitors, so the more pages you can optimise, the more rankings you’ll be able to achieve in the search engines.

2. State the Benefits
The visitors to your website will only be interested in ‘what’s in it for me’ so therefore don’t write all about your company and how great you are, just describing the services you offer. You must highlight the benefits of your products or services, what makes them and your company different from your competitors, and why your visitors should buy from you.

3. Make it Easy for People to Contact You
You’d be surprised at the number of websites that bury their contact details away, or barely put them on the site at all, with just a form to complete and no phone, email or physical address. If you want people to contact you, you must make it easy for them. Put your telephone and/or email address on each page of the site, and most importantly, put a physical address on a ‘contact us’ page. People will trust sites more with proper contact details than just a form to complete in the hope there’s someone there!

4. Include Testimonials
Testimonials are a great sales pitch on a website, showing that people have bought your products & services and enjoyed using them. I find the best way of using them is to dot them around the website on some of the key pages rather than put them all on one page. If testimonials relate to specific products or services, then put them on those pages. Don’t forget to collect them when you can.

5. Feature Case Studies
Case studies are a particularly good way of demonstrating your expertise if you provide a business service. These can not only be used on the site, but on other printed marketing materials. They show how your service has helped other businesses, and therefore how you can help prospects. Use these on your website to further reinforce your sales pitch.

6. Include News
It’s a good idea to have a page of news that includes your company news or industry news that you can keep up to date. Not only is this a good way of being able to add fresh content to your website on a regular basis, but shows you’re in touch with what’s happening in your industry and you can tell your visitors about what your company is doing. Put any PR coverage you get in industry journals or newspapers on your news page too.

7. Feature Products or Services
Another great way to keep your site fresh and up to date is to feature different products or services on your home page on a regular basis. This could be to increase sales for a particular product or service, feature new products and it keeps visitors coming back to your website to find about your latest offerings. If the site home page never changes, then visitors won’t be so inclined to come back to find out what’s new or make the most of your special offers.

8. Giveaways
Giveaways can really help to boost enquiries or sales through a website. By giving visitors some free information and tips to keep them interested, or even free samples and discounts on your products they’ll come back to you again and even tell their contacts about your site – many e-commerce sites regularly update their site with special offers or featured products and this can be applied to business sites as well as consumer sites. If you sell a service, you don’t have to give the whole game away, but certainly giving away tips ensures you stay in people’s minds as a good source of information and specialist in your sector.

9. Make Use of Broadband
Now that most people connect to the internet with broadband, you can really use this to your advantage. Make your site stand out from the crowd with video clips or audio clips that can be downloaded. Video clips can be great to demonstrate how to use products that are difficult to describe. Audio content is becoming more popular for business service providers as a way of recording seminars for people to download, or even teleseminars and workshop recordings that people can buy.

10. Add Other People's Content
Finally, with the ‘Web 2.0’ applications that are now so popular, many sites are encouraging visitors to add to their content. This can be through posting on blogs, adding video clips, surveys on websites, forums etc. This not only adds content to your website, but shows your website to be busy and encourages more visitors. Some great examples of how sites are using user generated content are Firebox (visitors can post product reviews and videos), YouTube which is hugely popular, and busy blogs such as Mattcutts.com – very popular for those in the search marketing industry - see the number of comments under each post!