Types of Content You Should Include in Your Website

Websites are made up of content. Sounds simple and obvious to say but sometimes it is worth stating. But before you go loading up your website with any old content you can lay your hands on, there are a few things you should bear in mind.

Ask yourself these following questions before putting any content onto your website.

What is the purpose of the content?

With different types of content, articles, blog posts, slideshows, videos etc., there could be different reasons for creating them.

For example, it could be to educate visitors:

Maybe you get the same questions over and over so you could build a FAQ section or page on the site.
You could have a complicated product or service that you need to educate people in a number of different ways so you could have detailed written guides, or maybe even a Powerpoint presentation or video.
And so on.

Each piece of content will need to have a purpose. Without a purpose it will not add value to your visitors nor your marketing efforts.

What format should it take?

As we have touched on before, content can take many different forms and there is good reason sometimes that content is added in multiple formats. Maybe give people the option of the written word, video or audio.

The other type of content that gets overlooked sometimes are tools and calculators. Interactive tools allow users to work out pricing and costs or help them understand a process. Or they can be used for comparison – a huge thing online. If you can build a tool to compare products and services that no-one else does then you could drive yourself more traffic.

Useful resources and databases are also useful content if you are providing something that no one else does or displaying it or allowing people to use it in a unique way. Your website designer will be able to create something for you that fits in with the rest of your website.

Types of content:

Video
Audio
Infographic
Presentation
Tools
Web based calculators
How to… (Instructables)
Blog posts
Guides
Question and Answers
FAQs
Useful Resources
And much more…

Don’t forget, you don't have to use one format per piece of content.

Have I said this before?

Revisiting your existing content before adding a new page will allow to you to save time and effort. For example, if you wanted to write a detailed guide on something, do you have a page already that you can use and expand on? It could be that page already ranks in Google and by tweaking the copy and bringing the page more up to date, this can actually help improve ranking and drive more traffic. The other knock on effect of this is it could then become something that other sites want to link to as it is a useful, comprehensive resource.

Is it unique?

Is this piece of content already out there? Are you simply copying it from someone else’s site? Please don't simply lift and reuse other people’s content (unless you have the author’s permission).

What do I want people to do once they have read it?

The purpose of your content as we have discussed is to either educate, entertain or help them make a buying decision. Whatever it is you want your customers to do, you need to be sure to help them to the next step in their journey.

It could be you want them to join your newsletter mailing list, or make an enquiry or call you or buy something online. Whatever it is you need to make sure that at the foot of the content you tell people what to do next – give them a call to action and do not assume they will know.

Summary

Hopefully these questions will help guide you each time you add content to your website. Simply adding content for the sake of it will not help grow your business. With careful planning and understanding, you will be much better placed to create a content marketing plan that works for everyone.

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