This article was updated on May 2nd, 2019. For newer insights on how to create engaging content, check out 13 Tips to Improve Your Copywriting for Better Search Rankings.

• Jun 20, 2018 How to Make a Successful Website: 10 Critical Factors. Successful websites nail UX and are run by companies that know their users, use data, and optimize over time.
• Michael will teach you proven techniques to help you create engaging content and grow your brand using social media.

To keep your user engaged with your design, use these tips when selecting and creating a website design: Include white space between your lines of text, around your images, and on the sides of your pages. Use headers for your text, and make the rest of your content short and scannable (approximately 1,600 characters or less is ideal.).

Everybody wants more traffic to their business website. That’s a no-brainer. But what those visitors do when they arrive is critical to your website’s success, and you don’t have much time to get it right. You need to create engaging content to drive those desirable visitor actions.

Reading a single blog post doesn’t equate a conversion (in most cases). Great content marketing is about aligning what your website delivers with what your target audience needs, helping them to find it at the right time, and leading them toward a profitable action: buying a product, providing their email address, downloading content, and other goals.

Unfortunately, a lot of content gets produced for the wrong reasons, and doesn’t help move the needle on conversions. That’s why we’ve put together these tips to help you improve your content marketing.

Contents

5 Steps To Creating An Engaging Highconversion Website Free

• How to create engaging content
• How to focus your content for more conversions

How to create engaging content

Make it easy to read

Unlike print material, web content needs to be easy to digest — and on mobile devices with different shapes of screens. This means that design and formatting play a roll in creating engaging content. We’ve actually written three articles that expand on ways to improve your content for accessibility:

• Follow the 10 Commandments of Great Web Writing

Make sure to use concise and captivating headlines, avoid overwhelming blocks of text, and use styling like bullets or indented paragraphs to create a cleaner space. Don’t forget to break up your copy with images! Make each step of content creation, from ideation to publication and sharing, about giving your customers the easiest path to completion.

Use a style guide

If you want to consistently create engaging content that really seizes the audience, you need brand guidelines. From voice and tone to colour choices, a complete brand style guide will help ensure your message is on point in every webpage, article, social media post, and email.

Utilize your keywords

One key aspect of engaging your audience is attracting the right audience in the first place. This is where SEO comes into play.

A solid understanding of keyword strategy and search intent will go a long way toward capturing people more likely to find your content useful. In turn, their engagement will send signals back to search engines that your content was relevant and useful, which can boost your ranking. It’s a win/win!

• Use an SEO tool like Moz, SEMRush, or Google’s Keyword Planner to identify the best keywords for your content
• Weave your target short- and/or long-tail keywords into copy naturally, avoiding keyword stuffing and considering Google’s latent semantic indexing (meaning it looks at variations of phrasing that mean the same thing)
• Optimize your images (filename, ALT text), plus headings, URLs, and meta descriptions
• Use tools like Yoast SEO for WordPress to get instant SEO scores on your content before publication, and adjust where needed

How to focus your content for more conversions

Be audience-aware

The more niche you can be about your target audience, the easier it will be to create engaging content.

Using Forge and Smith as an example, we could just write articles about web design and development. That’s a hugely broad category! Our primary focus is on small and medium businesses in Canada with existing websites that need a redesign. Within that category, we write content that helps those same people learn how to take care of their websites.

We also know that our audience has typical B2B browsing habits: they tend to access our site during the 9-5 hours, Monday to Friday, because they’re researching web design agencies while at work. LinkedIn is where we focus the most of our effort when it comes to amplifying our content, because that’s the social network our target audience uses most — and where the’d most likely engage with our content.

Solve their problems

What unique problem does your product or service solve? How are you different from competitors? Why should people care? These are questions that should drive each piece of content you create. The goal of good content marketing is to be helpful, because helping someone to solve a problem elevates their perception of you — and that’s how your content builds toward trust and conversions.

Google also rewards content for relevance, so the more helpful your content can be, the better. Imagine someone asks you for directions to a coffee shop. If you send them to a busy shopping area that you know has a few coffee shops, that’s kind of helpful. If you give them directions to your favourite little shop, and tell them why you love that place and even your favourite menu items, that’s a whole other level.

How engaging content makes marketing easier

You don’t have to give away the ‘secret sauce’ to your business! You do need to give your audience enough information to understand on their own that you really know this subject, and that your business is a reliable resource. That way when they need your specific product, you’ll be the one that pops into their mind.

Content marketing is a slow burn, and it can take over a year to see the results. It’s rare in our industry that someone would read a single blog post, then contact us to take on an entire website redesign. But by regularly producing content around this topic, we build up our brand awareness and search rankings. We develop backlinks in agency directories and in relevant articles. Happy clients recommend us to other businesses — and when those businesses go to research us, they find a website filled with intelligent content that supports those referrals.

If your goal is to create engaging content, with the best possible user experience, conversions will happen. Trying to get contact forms filled out or newsletter sign-ups without any proof of your expertise, well… that’s a mission impossible.

At the end of the day, your content marketing should make it easy for visitors to learn what they wanted to know, and choose the next step in their engagement with your business. Read more: 4 Ways Creating Content Should Be Like Hosting a Dinner Party.

No matter how great and useful your products or services are, poorly designed and boring website that does not engage your visitors will simply fail to attract and maintain their attention and convert them into customers. Unless you’re completely sure your website is close to perfect, consider these 10 simple ways to spice it up and make it more appealing and engaging for your visitors and customers.

1. Responsive Web Design

Even though responsive design is not a new concept, many businesses still lag behind in implementing it. Does your website look equally good no matter whether your visitors are looking at it on a desktop, tablet or phone? To make your website more engaging and provide a positive experience make sure it adjusts gracefully to perfectly fit any screen size of the device it’s being viewed on.

2. Easy and Intuitive Navigation

Can your visitors find their way around your website quickly and effortlessly? If not, reshape your site and make your navigation simple, logical and intuitive to help people find exactly what they are looking for in less than three seconds. If it takes longer, they are more likely to lose interest and leave your website.

5 Steps To Creating An Engaging Highconversion Website Using

3. Relevant and Valuable Content

The content you want people to read on your website needs to be easy to find, simple, highly relevant, valuable and presented in easily digestible amounts. Make sure that each page offers highly focused and exclusive content that matches the reason the person has arrived at the page. The tone of the content is equally important when it comes to establishing two-way communication on your website.

4. Obvious Call-to-Action

When your visitors arrive at the homepage of your website for the first time, you need to tell them what you want them to do on your site and why. What action do you want your visitors to take? Whether it’s purchasing your product, downloading your white paper, signing up for a trial, requesting more information or whatever else, make it obvious and visually prominent on your site.

5 Steps To Creating An Engaging High Conversion Website Article

5. References and Testimonials

If your customers find your products or services awesome, let your prospects know about this by sharing some real testimonials on your site. These compel the visitors to trust your claims more and increase the chance they’ll keep exploring your website to learn more about your offerings. References and testimonials are also a great way to prove authenticity without bragging about your company.

5 Steps To Creating An Engaging Highconversion Website Marketing

6. The Right Color Combination

Colors contribute greatly to the overall feel and look of your website. It’s a powerful means to touch the emotions of your site visitors. A perfect blend of colors is able to set the right tone and carry a necessary message for visitors. To make a positive first impression, make sure also that texts, images and graphics match or coordinate with the main colors of your site.

5 Steps To Creating An Engaging High Conversion Website Design

7. More Visuals

5 Steps To Creating An Engaging High Conversion Website Free

People love visual content, that’s why dressing up your website with more visuals (without overwhelming) will definitely do more good than harm. Simple tip: choose compelling images and photos that convey a feeling. Apart from that, you can add videos that work even better. Actually, video is one of the most engaging tools you can put on your website – it’s a great way of converting information into a meaningful and memorable content.

8. Clear Contact Details

Have you included sufficient contact details on your website? It might seem too obvious to mention here, but the truth is, many businesses still don’t completely realize what concealed contact information might be costing them. Failing to provide quick and easy access to contact details is a sure-fire way to frustrate your visitors and make them move on to the next Google result.

9. Visible Live Chat

If you are offering Live Chat support on your website, consider making the chat button visible on every page to provide your visitors with an easy and convenient way to get in touch with you no matter where on the site they are. Proactive chat invitations can also greatly increase engagement and conversions, as long as they are being used wisely.

10. Active Social Media Presence

Almost everyone is on social media today, so are your potential customers. Make sure to increase the visibility and reach of your website through participation in social media channels showing your visitors and customers that they have a wider variety of options for communicating with your company directly. Though simply being on social media doesn’t increase engagement. Being active on social media does.

Your website is a vital tool in your marketing strategy, so its ability to engage your visitors and encourage them to interact with your brand will have a powerful effect on your conversion rates. If you can think of other proven ways to make a website more engaging, feel free to share them in the comments.

_____

Provide Support is a leading customer service software provider, offering live chat and real-time visitor monitoring tool for businesses: www.ProvideSupport.com

• 12 Positive Phrases and Empathy Statements for Customer Service (Infographic) - March 1, 2018
• AI Chatbots Vs. Human Powered Live Chat: Which is Winning the Customer Service Game? - February 8, 2018
• 12 Major Reasons to Integrate Live Chat into Your Business (Infographic) - January 25, 2018