The importance of written content in web design and how to create high quality content

Written content is an important element of any web design strategy to attract and engage your customers. Yet, high-quality content is something many people either don’t know how to create or don’t realise its true value. In this article, we explore the importance of written content in web design and methods you can use to create quality content.

What is the importance of written content in web design?

A couple of men looking at a computer

Written content in web design is a crucial element that can make or break your site. Every searcher is on the lookout for a solution to their needs or problems. The information you provide on your site needs to help the searcher accomplish their goals.

Yet with many websites, the content is seen as low priority and often left until the last minute. This can have a huge impact on the performance of your website and makes it very difficult for your customers to engage with your brand. Without high-quality content, your website will fail to be seen by potential customers, and you’ll struggle to generate those vital conversions.

But what exactly counts as written content? It’s far more than just the writing that appears on a web page. Written content can include blogs, whitepapers, guides, case studies, and eBooks. The content format you choose needs to be relevant and suited to your customers.

Creating high-quality content is not an easy task and can take time and effort. However, there are significant benefits to spending time on this and ensuring that your content is of the highest quality possible.

Build trust

The first major benefit of high-quality written content is that it helps to build trust with your customers. Developing relevant content that appeals to your niche will demonstrate to customers that you are an authority in your field.

It also sends a clear signal that you understand your industry, the needs of your customers, and your products and services in detail. You can also set yourself apart from your competitors through the language, tone, and personality you use in your writing style.

Ensuring you provide sufficient, high-quality content is vital for helping your customers to better understand your company and brand. The more a customer understands you, the greater the trust you build. The stronger the trust has in you, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Grow your search engine visibility

Another benefit of high-quality written content is that it allows you to grow your search engine visibility. Google places great emphasis on high-quality content and is in fact an important ranking factor.

The primary goal of any search engine is to provide the most relevant results for a searcher’s query. This is done by crawling and indexing as many of the websites and pages it can come across.

Then, using a range of different ranking factors and signals, search engines can determine the quality, relevance, and authority of your site and content. The greater the relevance and authority, the better for boosting your rankings and SEO strategy.

By improving your rankings, you stand a much better chance of growing your online presence and ensuring searchers will find and engage with your business.

It supports other marketing efforts

Another benefit of written content in web design is that it can help support your other marketing efforts. The content you include on your website will form part of a content marketing strategy. This content will then be the basis for all your content marketing efforts elsewhere.

This includes social media content, blog posts, videos, infographics, you name it. By providing yourself with a strong foundation, you can keep the ball rolling by ensuring your other marketing efforts don’t fall short of delivering value.

Provides more backlinks

One more benefit of why written content is important is that it can help naturally provide more backlinks to your website. If you are creating high-quality content that adds value, other websites are much more likely to naturally link to it.

The more backlinks you gain from trusted and quality sources, the stronger the signal it sends to Google that your content is valuable. Any links you manage to naturally obtain indicate that other people think your content has value.

How can you create high-quality content?

A women writing content on a laptop

We’ve mentioned plenty already about the value of high-quality written content in web design. But how do you create high-quality content? High-quality content needs to be relevant, accurate, clear, organised, and optimised.

If you’re still stuck, there are several steps or tips you can follow to ensure your content hits the mark.

Put your customers first

The important thing to remember when writing high-quality content is to put your customers first, not your business. It’s important you consider what your users are interested in, want to find out about, or are looking for. If your content doesn’t have the information your audience seeks, it’s not providing value. And content that doesn’t provide value is not high-quality.

Research, research, research

The basis of any high-quality content strategy always begins with research. If you don’t have a deep understanding of your topic, how will you be able to provide the depth and knowledge that will appeal to customers?

If you want your content to stand out from the many other sites online, you need to conduct thorough research. There are several ways you can do this:

  • Make sure your content is backed up by research
  • Look for content gaps, either in your content or your competitor’s
  • Add data and facts with links to sources
  • Provide a unique angle, insight, or example of an existing topic

Fulfil your customer’s needs

A significant part of creating high-quality written content is that it fulfils your customer’s needs and adds value. But how do you know what your customer’s needs are and whether you are able to provide a solution? Fortunately, you can gain a deep insight into this with buyer personas.

These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on facts, data, and research. They provide insight into the needs, wants, and interests of your customers. As such, you can better understand how to address their questions and pain points.

When it comes to crafting effective buyer personas, you need to ensure you understand a customer’s motivations, pain points, and preferred channel or platform. Motivations refer to what a customer wants to achieve, while pain points are the problems they experience.

Use an emotional appeal

One effective method you can use to make your content more persuasive and valuable to customers is by using an emotional appeal. When it comes to writing content, you can either use an emotional appeal or an informational appeal.

While informational appeals are important in certain situations, such as explaining a product or features, it is not effective at evoking emotion. This is where an emotional appeal comes in. Evoking a particular emotion from your customers helps you build a much stronger connection with your brand.

This makes it easier for readers to resonate and relate to the content, creating a much stronger impact. It also helps in ensuring your content is valuable to your audience, which can build trust.

The use of appeal to emotions is a widely used fallacy in advertising as a way for advertisers to claim or win an argument instead of using logic. The same fallacy is effective in creating written content for web design. The best way to add an emotional appeal to your content is using Sinek’s Golden Circle.

Readability

We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve come across a piece of content online that doesn’t make sense or read very well. Content that doesn’t read well cannot provide value to customers if they can’t grasp the meaning or message.

That’s why you must ensure that your web design content is readable. It’s all very well, adding in an emotional appeal and thoroughly researching your customers if they can’t understand the content.

Proofreading is the easiest and best way to ensure content is readable. Using a spell checker can also eliminate any spelling mistakes. Getting a colleague or someone else to review the content takes it one step further.

However, if you want to truly ensure your content is readable for your audience, you should be checking the readability score. While there are several around, the Flesch-Kincaid score is the most widely used.

This provides a score from 0-100 on how readable your content is. The higher the score, the easier it is to read. The score is calculated using an equation that factors in total words, total sentences, and total syllables. There are many free tools you can use to determine content readability, including Word, Grammarly, and an online Readability Analyser.

Use a clear structure

Another way you can improve the quality of your content is by using a clear hierarchical structure. Nobody wants to read a long block of text that has no breaks, subheadings, or any clear indication of structure.

Planning an outline and structure for your content ensures you cover all the main points clearly and coherently. It also makes it easier for your audience to read and find certain information.

It also helps in writing the content, giving you a clear, organised structure to ensure you stay on topic and follow a logical structure. To take it one step further, use varying sentence lengths and avoid using more than 300 words of content without headings or subheadings.

Using lists, such as bullet points, and matching visual content is another way you can improve the structure of your content. This helps break the content up, making it more engaging and readable.

Understand search intent

One more tip for how you can create high-quality content is by understanding and aligning it with the user’s search intent. Search intent refers to the goal behind a user’s search, such as finding information or buying a product.

There are four search intents:

  • Informational
  • Commercial
  • Transactional
  • Navigational

To appeal to a wide range of searches and appeal to users, you should aim to create content specific to a search intent. It also ensures the content you create appeals to your user’s needs and fulfils their search query.

Understanding search intent will allow you to create written content tailored to the search needs of a customer and keep your content relevant. Ensuring your content aligns with a user’s search intent is also a good way to improve your rankings.

Following the tips above will set you on the path to creating high-quality content that provides value and meaning to your users. By focusing on your customers, you can ensure your business and website will continue to grow stronger and drive better results.