In the third and final part of our Content First series, we’re looking at the importance of content  itself. Exploring the impact your tone of voice has on depicting your brand, the importance of original visuals, call to actions and page optimisation, we’ll help you turn your new website into an engaging, intuitive and rewarding experience for users. 

Find Your Tone of Voice

Gathering content from multiple sources and stakeholders is inevitable, but this can lead to a mixed and confused tone of voice. As part of your branding, you should have already determined your brand's tone of voice, for example, this could be knowledgeable, authoritative and confident or informal, conversational and light-hearted. 

Setting the tone and maintaining continuity throughout your writing will allow you to keep a flow to your website while reinforcing your brand identity

Consider Your Call To Action

What action do you want the user to take when landing on your website? 

Your call to action should be relevant to your business and support the objectives of the website, guiding the user to take the action required to achieve this. This could be:

• Download a document
• Data capture
• Enquiry form
• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Share content
• Make a purchase

Understanding and building these actions into your content plan will ensure you get the most out of your new website, helping you to drive engagement, conversions, revenue, leads and profit.

Don’t Forget The Visuals

As touched upon in our post Curating Content to Reflect Brand Identity, content is not just words. It’s brand, images and video, everything that makes up what a user sees on the page. The images you use need to be as considered as the words on the page. These are what will grab the users attention, and they need to be reflective of your brand and the message you are portraying.

We don’t recommend using stock images where possible as the likelihood is that the same image is being used on dozens of other websites. Use original images where possible that reflect your business, people, services or products. This personal touch can help you to illustrate your brand, messaging and business in a simple and authentic way.

Optimise Your Content

Keyword research and SEO optimisation are important to help drive traffic to your site and improve your search engine rankings, but you don’t want to fall into the trap of structuring your content around them. Squeezing 50 keywords into one paragraph will make the page unreadable, losing the natural language flow and you’ll end up sounding robotic. You want your content to be searchable and relevant to the user, so instead of writing content for SEO, write it with SEO in mind.

Ensure you follow SEO best practices such as using H1’s, metatags and adding alt tags to your images. This will improve your Google quality score and improve your ranking on search engines. For more information about SEO and best practices, please speak to our sister agencies WMG and Ingenuity Digital.

Summary

A user will judge your site based on what’s presented to them, quickly forming an opinion on whether to stay on the site and explore, or move on. Content is what will determine whether a user sticks or twists. Making an impact with vibrant imagery and statement text will tell people what you do, what you offer, and if that’s a product or service they need. It can also support and reinforce brand influencing users to take actions. To achieve this you need to plan and consider your content in advance, taking your tone of voice, call to actions and visuals into account - do this properly and the rewards will follow.