10 Content Creation Best Practices
Your company deserves some recognition, and you want to stand out from the crowd, but you may not know how to do this effectively. We’ve detailed 10 content creation best practices to make your company stand out.
1. Have a Purpose for Your Content
When deciding to develop content for your site, start by evaluating what you are trying to achieve with your content—don’t create content merely to fill up space on your site.
Once you have determined your purpose/goal, ensure your content stays true. Your purpose should guide your content strategy as you plan how to reach your targeted consumers.
2. Pay Attention to Your Headers
A good header draws the consumer’s attention and reflects your company accurately. The header typically includes the logo, search field, a call to action, and a navigational menu, among other things.
The visual hierarchy of the header needs to be clear, which will help reduce your site’s bounce rate. Use design principles such as alignment, color, and fonts to draw consumers’ attention without overwhelming them with information.
3. Follow a Logical Linking Structure
When writing content, it’s best to hyperlink to other pages within your site or another reputable source. Only add links to technical and the most helpful content. Too many links can be confusing and discouraging to a user seeking direct communication—beware of linking so often that it decreases the page’s aesthetics and readability.
4. Be Consistent in Your Formatting Style
Content is important for any website, but it should look appealing to grab visitors’ attention. When formatting content on your page, use two simple principles: simplicity and accessibility.
Make the users’ experience as easy as possible by ensuring that:
- Headers are appropriate and clear
- You use subheadings to reduce long reads
- Images supplement the content, not distract or overrule the written content
- You use bullets points or numbered lists to break bulky written sections
Good formatting reduces your site’s bounce rate by ensuring that content is accessible to all customers.
5. Content Should Provide Value to Users
Anyone can create content, but not everyone can create quality content. If your website carries blog articles about certain topics, ensure that the content is in-depth and relatable. Valuable content is all about the consumer’s interests, needs, and problems. The more people relate and connect with your content, the better.
Your website aims to reach users through interesting and helpful content. While SEO keywords are important, make sure that they actually fit with the article’s topic. And don’t forget to share new content frequently and consistently!
6. Develop Content That’s Relevant to Your Business/Industry
Many companies push out incredible amounts of content to attract visitors to their sites. However, huge traffic doesn’t always translate. To reduce your site’s bounce rate, develop content that matches your business.
Avoid the temptation to only focus on controversial topics that you feel might attract readers. If you have to use current trends, focus on ones that can be tied to your business or industry. To discover new trends, use sources in social media and competitor sites to grab audience attention better.
7. Use Multimedia Content to Distinguish Your Site
A picture is worth a thousand words—but videos, gifs, and other interactive formats rank higher in appeal. A site with well-detailed headers, an intriguing image, video, and text that ties it all together will keep a reader engaged. With readers getting bored easily, interactive multimedia content can distinguish your site from other rivals.
8. Make Your Site is Easy to Search and Read
Now that you have valuable and current content, your site must be easy to navigate. Sometimes it might get hard for the consumer to locate what they need quickly.
To reduce your site’s bounce rate, include tools such as a search button, a sticky menu, and breadcrumbs (Ex: Home > About Us > FAQs). Make sure the hierarchy is clear on the menu so that the most important pages are at the top.
9. Optimize Your Content for Mobile Devices
Because most media consumption happens on mobile devices, it’s integral that your website is mobile-friendly. Previewing the website from a mobile device is the obvious first step. Still, other good practices to make your website mobile-friendly include having short paragraphs, short titles, and clear sections of information.
Following other advice, such as making the website easy to navigate, using good formatting techniques, and including images, will also help you optimize your content for viewing on mobile devices.
10. Include a Bold, Clear Call to Action (CTA)
After developing valuable content, don’t forget that you need a call to action to wrap things up. Give the consumers a clear takeaway, whether to buy a product, follow your company on social media, subscribe, or click on a hyperlink. This will help push the consumer from being a viewer/visitor to a customer.
Final Thoughts
Creating quality content does not need to be an overwhelming challenge; take the time to create a content creation strategy and stick to it. You should also set a time to review your content creation strategy to improve any weak points, whether annually or semi-annually.