How to capture audiences with your website’s content

Optimising your website to pull in your target audience is down to SEO, your website’s architecture, and design & development. 

Content architecture and content forecasting are valuable first steps for planning and building your sites content. We recently held a webinar on creating a content strategy where we go into more depth about these concepts. If you would like to learn more about this, view our webinar recording.

What is SEO and how can it help you to create more intuitive content?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it is important for getting your website seen by your intended audiences. SEO has be seen of a bit of a dark art in the past and this is because no one really understands how search engines rank content, getting in a specialist SEO content strategist, writer or agency can be a costly expense so what tools and tips are out there that will help you make your content go further and enhance your SEO efforts at the same time?

Say you are a gallery who sells artwork and exhibition tickets; how are you going to grab your audience in the first place? Utilising SEO and basic development  of your website’s content through development should be the first port of call.

Seven suggestions for writing SEO 

SEO is down to a number of factors, some more technical than others. However, there are things you can do to optimise your web content. We’ve put together 7 tops for writing for SEO.

Rankings are determined by Google’s Search Algorithm, many will presume that getting in lots of keywords writing for Google’s web crawler or ‘Googlebots’ is how to write SEO-friendly content. But it’s the opposite. Lots of keywords are likely to make your content messy and hard to read.

Remember that Google’s Search Algorithm is actually looking out for quality content that is interesting, informative and, importantly, written by and for humans.

This is about making your site accessible. The easier the content is to read, the more likely it is to rank highly in search engines.

You want to make sure you are including alt tags (alternative text, alt attributes, alt descriptions) in all assets such as videos and images. This will help people who use assistive technology such as screen readers to be able to understand information and help your content to rank higher.

This relates to understanding your audience, and how they search. Once you know this, you will be able to write content specifically suited to your users. You can find keywords using tools like Answer the public, Google Trends, Yoast, Google Analytics & Hotjar.

Utilise your channels! Don’t limit your content to your website’s audience, ensure to promote your content on your socials to cater for a broader collection of people.

You also want to think of the different forms that content can take, eg. blog posts, web page content or news items. How are you incorporating this into your strategy?

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

It’s not a ranking factor, but it is a solid framework for what search engines such as Google are looking for. Google is looking for content that is written with in-depth knowledge and expertise, from a trustworthy source that has ‘authority’ known by the search engine as a source of integrity.

Are you engaging with your audience via multiple touch points in your content? Utilising internal linking to relevant information in your content is a great way to give your site authority and indicates to search engines that you have even more relevant information to help the user.

Do you have appropriate call-to-actions such as a ‘Read more’ button or ‘Plan your visit’ Links? Think about what you want your user to do next and either forecast how they might move through the content or do user testing.

This will indicate to you whether your users are wanting to get in touch with you via a contact form, read another article, sign up to a newsletter for more relevant information or to follow you on one of your social channels, which will help you to create insightful cuts or additions.

Having clean and considered code is a way to bring audiences to your site and is also a very important accessibility feature. A user first approach is always a good and stable way to build a content strategy.

One way you can increase the likelihood of your site ranking highly on any search engine is through adding Meta Tags to the head of your code. Meta tags are tags that are placed into sites to describe and help to identify the purpose of the website and are a very simple way of getting your content in front of the audiences that you want. If your site is SEO friendly; ie, can be found easily in a Google search, your content will be one less click away from your potential users. Your developer will be able to add meta tags to the head of your site to aid this.

Conclusion

Let’s summarise what you should think about in order to increase your SEO ranking: 

• Think and write like a human and assess your users needs. Thinking like your audience results in more accessible and widely visited content.
• You don’t need to spend money on SEO tools
• Utilise the free tools at your disposal for getting your content seen. There are plenty which can help you to analyse and create metrics for your content.
• Take an omni-channel approach across all relevant platforms.

Following these steps will help you to target multiple angles of your site and boost your chances of positive engagement!