Effective website content is your brand’s first impression. It should grab your target audience’s attention, engage visitors, and drive conversions.
Whether selling products, offering services, or simply sharing information, the right content can guide potential customers through their decision-making process and toward a desired action.
Your content can turn casual browsers into loyal, repeat customers—an essential online business goal.
In this article, I’ll guide you through the steps needed to create compelling content for your website and share 5 best practices to ensure your content isn’t just good but exceptional.
What you will learn
- What is website content
- The type of web copy you can publish
- 9 steps to create effective website content and meet your online goals
- Best practices to implement for excellent content creation
What is website content?
Website content includes any material—written, visual, or interactive—that appears on your site. It’s designed to inform, engage, and convert visitors.
It comes in various forms, each serving a unique purpose across different web pages:
- Short-form copy: Homepages, product descriptions, and calls to action
- Blog articles: In-depth articles
- Infographics: Visuals simplifying complex information
- Interactive content: Quizzes and forms
- Landing pages: Conversion-focused pages to capture leads or prompt specific actions
- Thought leadership content: High-quality articles, interviews, or opinion pieces
- Premium content: Ebooks and white papers
Balancing a mix of engaging written content, compelling visuals, and interactive elements can create a more dynamic user experience. This guides visitors seamlessly through your buying journey—from discovering your brand to becoming loyal customers.
What content should be on a website?
Every website needs engaging content for different purposes, such as informing visitors about your brand and driving conversions.
Maintaining brand consistency across the entire website is crucial to ensure that all sections reflect a cohesive brand personality, which helps in establishing trust and recognition with visitors.
Here are the essential pages and content your website should have:
Homepage
Your homepage is the digital front door to your business. It’s a clear snapshot of who you are, what you offer, and what action you want visitors to take.
Nearly 80% of visitors scan website content. So, it’s essential to create a compelling homepage with short, concise, and persuasive copy that quickly communicates key messages.
Use strategic visuals, bold headlines, and clear CTAs to capture readers’ attention and drive engagement.
Trello’s homepage effectively uses a simple headline, strategic imagery, and prominent CTAs to convey the app’s value proposition and encourage user action.
About Us Page
An “About Us” page should do more than describe your business; it should tell your story.
Include your mission statement, vision, company history, and team introduction to help visitors understand your values, build credibility, and showcase your experience.
Use this page to connect with your audience, highlighting what makes your company unique.
Wag! does this well by communicating its mission, sharing a growth timeline, and introducing its team. This fosters trust among pet owners looking for reliable care services.
Service/product page(s)
Each core offering should have its dedicated page, focusing on benefit-driven content that shows how your product or service solves problems or adds value.
Use compelling visuals to highlight features and engage visitors. Include a strong CTA to prompt the next step, whether it’s a purchase, consultation, or newsletter signup.
Effective service or product pages turn curiosity into conversions.
Apple exemplifies this with product pages that combine benefit-focused content, stunning visuals, and clear CTAs to drive action.
Blog/resource center
A robust blog or resource center is a powerful tool for building authority and connecting with your target audience.
Regularly publishing high-quality content that addresses your readers’ questions and concerns establishes your brand as a trusted information source.
Blogs drive traffic and foster loyalty and engagement.
Including an FAQ section within your resource center can address immediate concerns and provide quick access to crucial, relevant information. Readily available answers increase the likelihood of conversion.
Asana’s resource hub offers articles, reports, videos, and webinars to enhance productivity and showcase project management expertise.
Contact page
Your contact page is a vital bridge between your business, prospective clients, and actual customers.
Offer multiple contact options like email, phone, and live chat.
This ensures visitors can reach out in their preferred way, improving user satisfaction and engagement.
Email forms can prevent spam, manage inquiries efficiently, and build an email list for future marketing purposes.
HubSpot’s contact page offers several ways for users to contact it, including live chat, phone numbers, and a fax number.
Customer stories and testimonials
Customer testimonials and case studies are powerful for building credibility and trust.
Almost 90% of consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations, making testimonials a vital part of your website content strategy.
Feature testimonials that highlight customer satisfaction and success prominently on your website.
Craft case studies showcasing how your product/service solved a problem or delivered exceptional results to provide tangible proof of your value and convert visitors into clients.
Shopify showcases various customer testimonials and case studies, demonstrating their platform’s success and building trust with potential users.
How to create website content: 9 steps to follow
Creating high-quality website content requires a strategic approach.
Follow these nine essential steps to help you craft valuable content that captures attention, drives engagement, and increases your conversation rate.
1. Understand your audience
Understanding your target audience is key to creating content that resonates. Research their preferences, challenges, and needs to grasp what truly matters to them.
Develop detailed reader personas that outline demographics, interests, and online behavior.
Create content that is tailored to different audience personas.
This approach builds trust and fosters a connection by addressing your audience’s needs.
To build your persona, you can use free tools such as Hubspot’s Make My Persona or Miro persona templates.
2. Develop a brand voice and style guide
A consistent brand voice builds a recognizable and relatable identity.
Base your brand voice on audience insights—what tone resonates best with them?
To maintain this consistency across all content, develop a comprehensive style guide to standardize:
- Tone of voice
- Typography
- Formatting
- Image guidelines
- Grammar, word usage, and point of view
Mailchimp’s style guide clearly defines its brand voice. It includes detailed guidelines on tone, typography, accessibility, and more to maintain a consistent brand presence across all platforms.
3. Define your unique selling proposition
Your unique selling proposition (USP) sets your brand apart. It’s the unique benefit or value only you can provide.
A clear USP helps you stand out, so weaving it into your website’s content is essential. Highlight your USP prominently on key pages, such as the homepage, service pages, and product descriptions, to immediately communicate what makes your brand special.
Ensure your USP speaks to your target audience, addressing their needs or pain points to maximize impact.
That’s precisely what Nerd Fitness does. It offers an inclusive, fun, and engaging approach to fitness with a welcoming community and personalized guidance for those who feel out of place in traditional gyms.
4. Research relevant keywords
Keywords connect what your audience is searching for to your content. Use relevant keywords throughout your content to align with your audience’s search behavior and intent.
Incorporate these SEO keywords across your website, blog posts, and other content to match different search intents and attract more traffic.
You can find relevant keywords relying on free methods like Googe search. Look at the autocomplete recommendations, people also ask section, and related searches for a given keyword.
Note down the keywords that are relevant to your business.
However, when it comes to choosing which keywords to target, you need to use a dedicated keyword research tool. A tool like Surfer can help you assess key metrics like keyword difficulty and search volume.
Ideally, you want to focus on keywords with a low difficulty and relatively high search volume.
Once you get to rank for such keywords, you can turn your attention to more competitive ones.
5. Develop a content strategy
A solid content strategy begins with understanding your audience and using keyword research to determine what content resonates most.
Conducting brainstorming sessions and researching competitors' content can uncover effective formats and topics that inspire new content strategies and enhance audience engagement.
Then, it’s about how you bring the above together.
Create content clusters—interlinked pieces supporting a central topic—to streamline planning and boost SEO.
98% of SEOs consider content clusters an important part of their content strategy.
For instance, Wistia’s Guide to Video Marketing is a central pillar, surrounded by articles exploring specific aspects of video marketing - all part of one content cluster.
You can identify relevant clusters using Surfer’s Topic Explorer.
Connect your Google Search Console data, and Surfer will generate your domain map. You can look at your topical coverage and plan which content to write next.
6. Write your web copy
When creating website content, start with short-form web copy. This includes key pages like the homepage, About Us page, and product and services pages.
These pages set the tone for your website and are often the first content visitors see, so getting them right is crucial.
Follow these tips for writing website copy:
- Keep it concise and to the point.
- When discussing products and services, provide value by highlighting benefits over features.
- Use relevant keywords strategically to enhance SEO. Never keyword stuff your content.
- Craft clear CTAs to guide visitors to the desired action.
Dropbox’s product pages use concise, benefit-driven language with strategic keywords and clear CTAs.
7. Create high-quality blog posts
A strong blog is vital for building authority and improving search results. Blogs provide a platform to share valuable, people-first content that prioritize helpfulness, clarity, unique insights, and authoritative data.
However, creating high quality content can be quite a time-consuming task.
For that, you can leverage AI tools to streamline the process without compromising on quality.
Google doesn’t penalize AI-generated content, as long as it adheres to its helpful content guidelines.
For instance, here’s an article on our blog generated Surfer AI.
8. Optimize content for search engines
To ensure your content reaches the right audience, you must follow SEO best practices, such as:
- Add relevant keywords to the URL, meta title, meta description, headings, and the body copy
- Use optimized alt text for images to boost search engine optimization and accessibility
- Have a solid internal linking strategy to keep users engaged longer and to build topical authority
You can easily optimize your blog posts for the above using Surfer’s Content Editor.
In the Content Editor you can see which keywords to add in your content and how often.
You can add these keywords manually or use the Auto-Optimize feature to do it for you.
Similarly, the Insert internal links feature will automatically link your content to other relevant pages on your site - all with just one click.
9. Monitor and improve your content
Creating quality content is just the beginning. Continuously monitoring its performance is vital to long-term success.
Use analytics tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track important metrics:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Rankings
- Bounce rate
This data provides valuable insights into what’s working and what weak areas need tweaking to refine your website content strategy.
Update your existing content regularly to keep it relevant, optimized for search engines, and valuable to your target audience.
Not sure which content to update?
Surfer’s Content Audit monitors your content and SERPs and identifies improvement opportunities for you.
5 website content creation best practices
Here are some website content best practices to elevate your copy, engage readers, rank well on search engines, and drive meaningful results:
1. Focus on headlines and hero sections
Make your headlines count since they are the first impression of your content.
Create clear, concise, and attention-grabbing headlines that promise value. Use numbers, questions, and intriguing statements to attract readers and boost click-through rates.
Similarly, the hero section—the prominent area at the top of your page—should immediately engage visitors. It often includes a bold headline, subheadline, and a compelling CTA.
A strong hero section sets the tone for the rest of the page, encouraging readers to keep scrolling and exploring your content.
Monday.com has an attention-grabbing hero section with a strong CTA and a straightforward, value-driven headline and subheadline that clarifies the tool’s purpose.
2. Ensure readability and skimmability
Making your content easy to read and skim is crucial for keeping readers engaged.
Remember to use subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to break up the text. Highlight important points with bold or italicized text. Using simple language and short sentences improves accessibility for a broader audience.
Tools like the Hemingway App or Grammarly can help assess and enhance readability, making your content more effective and engaging.
3. Leverage captivating visuals
Effective visuals break up long blocks of text. Visually appealing and digestible images engage your audience.
Including images, infographics, and videos in your content can increase views by 94% over text-only content.
These visual assets add value by enhancing understanding and information retention.
It is important to optimize images for faster loading time without sacrificing quality. Slow-to-load visuals negatively impact user experience and SEO.
4. Make your content mobile-friendly
Mobile devices receive nearly 70% of web traffic, compared to desktop’s 30%. If your content isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re losing a significant share of organic traffic.
Plus, Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing means that how your content performs on mobile can directly impact your search rankings.
Ensure your content is easily accessible and legible on small screens.
Test it across different devices for a consistent user experience.
5. Streamline your content production workflow
Streamlining your content production workflow is essential for maintaining efficiency and consistency. The right tools can make a significant difference in every process stage.
With a tool like Surfer you can take care of the whole content production workflow, from keyword research to content planning and monitoring.
By leveraging technology, you can automate repetitive tasks, maintain a steady content pipeline, and focus more on creating high-quality, engaging content that drives results.
Key takeaways
- Website content is diverse, including written, visual, and interactive materials designed to engage and convert visitors.
- Essential web content includes homepages, About Us pages, service/product pages, blogs, and contact pages.
- Understanding your audience is crucial for creating relevant and engaging content.
- Developing a consistent brand voice and style guide ensures a recognizable and relatable identity.
- Highlight your unique selling proposition (USP) to stand out from competitors.
- Conduct thorough keyword research to align your content with audience search behavior and improve SEO.
- A well-structured content strategy, including content clusters, helps streamline planning and boosts SEO.
- Writing concise, benefit-driven web copy with clear CTAs enhances user engagement and conversions.
- High-quality blog posts build authority and improve search engine rankings.
- Optimize your content for search engines by incorporating relevant keywords, using optimized alt text, and having a solid internal linking strategy.
- Continuously monitor and improve your content's performance using analytics tools.
- Best practices for content creation include focusing on headlines and hero sections, ensuring readability and skimmability, leveraging captivating visuals, making content mobile-friendly, and streamlining the content production workflow.
Craft effective website content
To create impactful website content, focus on delivering value through well-researched, engaging, and user-centric material.
By prioritizing quality, relevance, and SEO best practices, you can significantly improve your website's performance.
Tools like Surfer can help streamline this process by optimizing your content for search engines, ensuring it resonates with your audience, and ultimately driving better results.
Try Surfer today and start climbing the SERPs.
