Your ecommerce website content is a critical part of your website and the content needs to be created and regularly maintained with careful thought and planning. Content will be used across all of the media that your business uses eg advertising, print, emails, website etc and so it is not just isolated to your website.
Poor content will have a large negative impact on your website while good content will have a positive effect.
I assume that you want your website to attract new & repeat customers, to provide information on your products and services, to make online sales, have high keyword rankings on the major search engines and be ahead of your competition. Having great content is a major factor in achieving these goals.
Here some tips on how to create & write good content for your website.
Do your Research first – you need to know what your customers want before you can create content for them. Also you should understand your industry and competitors and what they are doing with and the type of information that they provide. This can also be a valuable source of information on products and the industry in general.
Have a strategy on how and why you will provide certain content across all of the media that you use – you also need to know how often it will be published and by what method eg blog, forum, email, facebook. This should be a core component of your marketing strategy.
Embrace social media because that is where your customers are located and they expect to be engaged via social media as well as your website and other communication methods that you use.
Avoid duplicate content – all content should be unique where possible so that you gain the maximum search engine optimization.
Quality – make every effort to ensure that you are offering top quality content on your website so that it looks professional and that clients can trust you as a representative of your industry and products that you sell.
Review & Update your content regularly – your website content cannot remain static and it needs to be regularly updated to encourage customers to regularly visit your site and attract new customers.
Images and Website layout – these all go hand in glove with your content. They must all be used to offer a website that looks professional and is pleasing to use whilst providing content that encourages your customers to make purchases and to visit your website on a regular basis.
Tips for writing content
1. Important information should be at the top of the page and keep it short & punchy & use active language. Many customers just scan pages rather than read all of the content so you need to break your copy up with headings & bullet points, etc. If a product has a long description then by all means provide this formation but make sure that its formatted so its easy to read or offer a pdf download.
2. Using language and terms that your customers would use and understand.
3. Make it customer focus to ensure that you are talking directly to them.
4. Dont be annoying as this can lead to customers leaving your website.
5. Make sure that your grammar and spelling are correct.
6. Technical information and industry terminology should be explained or have references so that customers can understand the use of this information.
7. Use html markup that maximises your search engine optimization opportunities eg use of H1 and H2 tags are used by the search engines to rank your keywords.
Can you do this in-house? Its possible with training and practice but I highly recommend employing a expert content author to get your content online as quickly as possible. Longer term you can develop in-house editor skills if this is important to your business.
Have a look at your website content today and identify how it can be improved and your website & business will benefit.
