Website content for solving specific tasks

Content for a Website is the Substance, While the Website Itself is the Form

Ideally, the website’s form should adapt to its content. By determining the content, you also determine the website’s structure. After all, only by knowing the specific business goals and the nature of the content can developers and designers offer the best solution.

Content for the Website: First Steps

Filling a website is not just about having content for the sake of it. It’s about texts, infographics, videos, and visuals that solve specific problems and appeal to a specific audience. Therefore, preparing content for a website is a job that starts from afar. Here are a few strategically important steps you need to take.

Create a Portrait of Your Target Audience

Selling everything to everyone is an outdated 20th-century strategy. For business success, it’s crucial to understand who you’re making a commercial offer to and why it’s beneficial and useful for potential customers.

Consumer behavior is determined by many criteria, including:

• – Gender
• – Age
• – Social status
• – Income level
• – Marital status
• – Presence of children
• – Profession/field of activity
• – Education
• – National and cultural characteristics
• – Geography

Create a portrait of your target audience, or specific groups if the audience is diverse. Read more about the target audience in this article (link to the original article).

The more you know about your target audience and the more precise its segmentation, the higher the chances that your offer will hit the mark.

Example: If your audience is young women with a sweet tooth, you’ll sell them chocolate as “a delicious dessert with various flavors.” But what if your audience is rugged men, mountain climbers, extreme tourists? In this case, you’ll position the same chocolate as “high-calorie energy food that doesn’t spoil, requires no cooking, and takes up minimal space.”

Determine the Goals of the Website

The structure and functionality of the resource, and of course, the direction of the website’s content, depend on this. If you have an online store, the website should have a catalog, the ability to create a shopping cart and place an order, and product cards will become the basis of the website’s content. If you have a small company offering 1-3 services, a landing page with a consultation request form will suffice. Content for this type of website should be concise, sales-oriented, and support every figure or fact.

The main tasks that a company’s website solves include:

• – Creating a virtual business card of the company. You will receive a 24/7 representation of the company on the Internet on 4-5 pages with the ability for visitors to contact you or ask a question.
• – Collecting, retaining, and engaging the audience in communication with company representatives. A blog, chats with a company manager or chatbot, news, and promotions beneficial to users will help solve this problem.
• – Collecting a customer base. This is usually solved by placing a lead magnet on the website, which users receive in exchange for an email address or the opportunity to subscribe to a newsletter.
• – Increasing the company’s expertise. A blog where the company posts high-quality thematic articles will not only attract an interested audience but also help strengthen its reputation.
• – Search engine promotion (SEO). People who come from search are usually warm leads, already interested in the product that your company offers. To promote in search, keywords are naturally incorporated into the content of the main pages of the website. A special section can also be created on the website, which will be filled with articles for SEO promotion. For good ranking, it’s important that the website’s content is not static, but constantly updated and supplemented.

Study Competitors’ Websites

You can see competitors’ websites in the Yandex or Google advertising results, as it’s important to consider those who receive paid traffic in your niche.

To do this, simply go to the search engine, type in a key query on your topic, and then click on the sub-item “Show all.” You will see all the websites whose owners pay for contextual advertising.

<figure> <figcaption>Clicking on the text “Show all” will show you the full advertising results</figcaption> </figure>

Analytical digital tools like Pr-cy.ru or Serpstat can also help you find competitors.

Browse websites, write down interesting article topics, and take screenshots of unusual features that competitors use. This knowledge will help you make your website content interesting, engaging, and useful. It will also help you avoid mistakes that you find on competing resources.

Choose Formats and Types of Content

The functionality of your website, which developers will design, depends on the chosen content formats. They need to understand whether the website will have diagrams, graphs, GIF tips, and video materials in addition to text.

Infographics help explain complex processes clearly and simply, illustrate statistics, historical data, or facts. Information supported by infographics is better remembered. Short videos are good for introducing the company, its key employees, or demonstrating a product. The audience also perceives video reviews positively – they evoke more trust than text reviews. Websites can also host video recordings of training webinars, especially for online schools or psychological help resources.

The types of content for the website are also important – educational, entertaining, informational, selling. A variety of content delivery will help make your content strategy as effective as possible. After all, the articles section or blog should be updated constantly and systematically, replenished with unique content.

Think About Sources of Information for Content

If you plan to post photos and videos, it’s important to understand which of the company’s employees will be responsible for this or plan a budget in advance to attract specialists.

Information for articles can be taken:

• From open sources on the Internet – thematic websites, forums, blogs, news feeds
• From customer surveys
• From surveys of company employees, for example, a marketer, an email marketing specialist, a web analyst, a sales manager
• From your own experience

Thinking about who will be involved in collecting information and preparing materials, once again assess your resources – whether company employees will be able to do this or whether you will need to contact a third-party specialist. It’s important to understand this before starting work on the website.

When you already have a portrait of the target audience, an analysis of competitors’ content, clear plans for the content for your site, and an understanding of the tasks of the resource, its structure also develops. After that, you can form a technical task for developers and designers and proceed directly to work with the content.

How to Create Unique Content for a Website

Think about unique content for the main page of the site. It should answer the main questions that arise for a person who first came to the site:

• What does the company do?
• How long has it existed?
• Where can I see the products?
• Why can the company be trusted?
• How is it different from dozens of competitors?
• What do I need to do to buy a product or order a service?
• What do those who have already become clients of the company say?

This information will be provided by the owner of the company, the head of the sales department, and the marketer.

For the design of another iconic section of the site – the catalog – competent visualization of products is important. To make the catalog attractive from the point of view of promotion and in the same style, it is better to contact a professional photographer who will create high-quality visuals.

As a rule, the text of the landing page is created once, as well as the texts of the main page of the site, the “About the company” section, the page dedicated to service, delivery, and payment. Pages with descriptions of goods and services are changed and supplemented in cases where the company’s assortment or range of services changes. But the articles section or blog of the site should be updated constantly and systematically, replenished with unique texts.

To prevent the content for the site from being monotonous and boring to visitors, it is important to use different formats and types of content, as we wrote above. This could be:

• Question Article. “How do you choose a washing machine?”
• Test. “Do you use all the functions of the washing machine?”
• Review Article. “There are 3 types of washing machines – front-loading, top-loading, and hanging. Let’s talk about each of them.”
• Personal Experience Article. “How I chose a washing machine and what a terrible mistake I made.”
• Answer Article. “How to care for a washing machine so that it lasts up to 20 years – you asked, we answer.”
• Announcement-Gift. “We have a new model of washing machine! The first buyers get a 10% discount and free delivery.”
• Life Hacks. “How to eliminate the shortcomings of washing with the help of soda, a silver spoon, and the right choice of washing mode.”
• Cases. “We were ordered a narrow washing machine with drying and delivery to Kaliningrad – this is how we fulfilled this order in just 3 days.” You can talk about working with clients in the case study format – but don’t forget to agree with them in advance.
• Checklists. “Check if you are taking care of your washing machine properly.”
• Tops. “Top 10 most popular washing machines of 2020.”
• Guides – a detailed algorithm for solving a problem. “20 steps that will help you choose