Requirements and areas of work
The effectiveness of a site depends almost entirely on its content, because a visitor comes to a web resource precisely for useful information, and not for design.
High-quality, interesting and unique website content is already half the success of an online platform. Consider the main types of content, requirements for them, as well as areas of work with content and the cost of these services.
What is website content and how it affects conversions and sales
Website content is any information posted on it. Most often, content is understood as textual content, less often – video and audio materials. Without high-quality and regularly updated content, it is almost impossible to increase the efficiency of an online business and bring a site to the top of search rankings.
Any information that the site offers to the user should be useful. Practice shows that frankly promotional articles do not enjoy great confidence among readers. But reliable and relevant expert-type content that tells about all the pros, cons and features of a product, service or company, on the contrary, makes people stay on the site and, in the end, click the Buy button.
The level of sales is also influenced by such factors as the ease of perception and understandability of the content, the use of visual elements (illustrations, videos), high-quality internal link structure and the size of texts – other things being equal, more voluminous content “sells” better.
It is also important not to complicate the purchase process for a potential client – all the “buttons” should be at hand. And if, while viewing your content, a visitor wants to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or download your app, they should be able to do so immediately without having to wander around the site looking for an order form.
It is also worth mentioning that now search engine algorithms bring to the top of the results only sites with the highest quality content. In order to identify them, special behavioral ranking factors have been developed – scenarios of the behavior of visitors on the site, allowing search engines to determine how much the page is in demand by users.
Content types
Filling the site with content is an extremely important task. As already mentioned, high-quality site content is not only texts, but also illustrations, video and audio, as well as reference material, headings and meta tags.
Text content
There are several main types of text content:
- Copyright. Text created by a professional journalist or copywriter from scratch. This is unique content, most preferred by search engines and, of course, users.Author’s material increases the loyalty of site visitors to the product, service and the company itself, which means it has a positive effect on conversion and sales.
- Rewrite. This is a revised version of the finished text (not always, but often the content of other sites is used for this). Most often, rewriting consists in replacing words from the original text article with synonyms, which does not benefit either the style, or the perception, or the place of the site in the search results. However, high-quality rewriting that compiles multiple sources can approach copyright in quality.
- Translation of the original text of the article/material from one language to another. Since translation, as well as writing, creates the author’s text, from the point of view of search engines, this is unique content.
- Copy-paste. Direct copying of articles from other sources without making any changes to the text is the easiest way to fill the site with content and it is also the worst. First, the site runs the risk of being penalized by search engines. Secondly, it is contrary to copyright law, according to which such use of resources is a gross violation and entails serious liability. Thirdly, such content negatively affects the reputation of the company.
Video footage
Video content is various clips, video manuals, screencasts, training videos, films, video presentations, virtual tours and much more.
You can shoot them yourself, take them from free sources, buy them, or even involve users themselves in creating such content – for example, by organizing video contests.
Images
Any textual material should ideally be illustrated – this makes the text easier to read and increases the chances that it will be read to the end. Images include not only pictures, but also animation, photographs, diagrams, screenshots, slides.
Infographics are especially effective – they increase traffic by 12% on average. It is worth remembering the “picture to attract attention” phrase, which is often used on Facebook. Text with illustrations gets almost 100% more attention than text without pictures.
Titles
The title of the site plays a significant role in its promotion – it must be original, clearly describing its content, detailed and informative.There are several types of title – title, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6.
Title is the main title of the page. The title tag can be seen by hovering over the address bar. Search engines use it to determine what the page is about. It should be concise and directly describe the content of the page. In practice, many people make the mistake of choosing a title that is too broad or has nothing to do with the content of the page.
The h1 tag is intended for readers, it also describes the content of the page. You should avoid overloading the title with keywords, otherwise, firstly, the users themselves will instantly lose confidence in the site, and secondly, search engines may perceive them as spam.
H2-h6 tags are subheadings that structure the text and break it into semantic blocks. They serve as a certain skeleton of the article and allow the reader to evaluate the material for information of interest in a few seconds.
Website content requirements
There are certain requirements, compliance with which will help to promote the site, make it more popular, and also increase sales.
The uniqueness of the texts
Text content must be unique. There are several free online services with which you can check the site for uniqueness – for example, content-watch.ru, findcopy.ru, text.ru and many others.
It must be remembered that uniqueness in itself does not guarantee quality. Sales are boosted by high-quality, interesting author’s texts that are easy to read and contain useful information.
Informative
There are a lot of superficial empty articles on the Internet, from which the reader cannot draw any useful information. It is not worth continuing to distribute such materials – they will not benefit readers, and as a result, the site.
Content (and we are talking not only about textual content) must be useful, informative and professionally prepared.
Literacy
Low literacy rates are another problem for many sites. Heavy, difficult to understand language, an abundance of stylistic and spelling errors greatly undermine the credibility of the resource.
On the contrary, sites that professional copywriters, editors and proofreaders have worked on are much more in demand by users.
Submission and design of content
A massive text block without chapter division, without illustrations and supporting materials is hard to read. The same applies to randomly placed audio and video content.
Thoughtful layout is very important – it helps to focus the reader’s attention on the main elements of the site, to highlight its most important parts, which makes it easier to perceive the web resource as a whole and increases customer loyalty.
Search Engine Compliance
Search engines today have moved away from determining content relevancy by simply counting the number of keywords on a page. Instead, they analyze content blocks—paragraphs, sections, articles, and chapters—calculating semantic relationships between words.
Therefore, the advantage is given to material that deeply reveals the stated topic. Such site content occupies high positions in search results for several queries at once.
Speaking about the content of the site, it is impossible not to mention the keywords – it is for them that search engines will find your page. The text should be moderately saturated with “keywords” from the semantic core of the site (a set of search queries that are optimized to attract the target audience).
In order for the text to “like” the search engine, it must be divided into blocks (chapters, paragraphs, lists), contain a minimum of lyrical digressions and uninformative fragments.
Areas of work with site content
Website content management requires a serious and comprehensive approach. Website content is not created once and for all – it requires analysis, updating and control.
Filling the site with content
The more interesting the content, the more it meets the needs of visitors, the more time they will spend on the site. Content needs to be updated regularly. “Abandoned” sites are gradually losing their positions both among visitors and search engines.
This is especially true for the news section: when a visitor enters the site and sees that the most recent news is dated last year, he begins to think that all the rest of the information is most likely out of date.
And even if this does not reflect reality, the first impression will play a more serious role in this case. It is also very important to keep up-to-date support of such sections of the site as company contacts, its history and portfolio, information about special offers and prices for services.
Site content analysis
Content audit is needed to check its compliance with the tasks and goals of the site. Everyone needs this service, but especially those companies whose websites were created by non-professionals.
During the analysis of the content of the site, specialists can detect and correct errors, eliminate unnecessary repetitions and fill in the lack of information. The site content is also analyzed by SEO specialists who check the compliance of texts with search engine algorithms and, if necessary, perform optimization.
Content optimization
Website content optimization is bringing the text and other content of the resource in line with the requirements of search engines. This includes the introduction of keywords into the texts by which users will find the site, and the calculation of textual relevance, and the use of page markup tools. Sometimes it is necessary to rewrite existing texts, and sometimes it is easier and more reliable to rewrite them again.
The main thing is not the quantity of content, but its quality. An attempt to fill the site with low-quality material not only annoys users, but also leads those visitors from search engines who are not the target audience of the company.