Fresh and relevant writing on your website is an essential way to reach customers, business partners and search engines. But where do you start? The guide below will help you to put together a content strategy and fill your WordPress website with the words you need.

Devise a strategy

A good plan will help you to come up with new content even on a busy day – or react to a relevant news event in a way which will help you sell more.

Brand guidelines

Here’s a quick checklist to get a handle on your brand:

• Brand values
• Logo and how to use it
• Colour palette with swatches / hex codes etc
• Font – primary & secondary etc
• Selection of on-brand imagery
• Words – types of words & phrases which fit the brand
• Website – style and things which fit

If you have even a small guide with the items above gathered together, this will help you, your team and any contractors to produce content which furthers your business.

Who is your audience?

This is potentially the most important point to consider before doing anything.

If you are selling a course for beginner readers, maybe don’t write at all. Post videos instead. Have autoplay audio.

Create content for your site which speaks to your audience. If you’re running a DIY or enthusiast site, a conversational style works well – there are very few sites where an entirely formal writing style will be appropriate.

Get into the heads of your customers or audience – especially if the purchaser and the end product user are different people.

Researching your audience

• Check your site stats on Google Analytics or your other traffic and sales reports
• Check your feedback and social community interactions
• Check the customer journey and basket values
• Create profiles of your most common visitor or customer types

Brainstorm titles

Run through a list of relevant pages, posts and help pages you could create. Bear in mind your business goals and the way your website visitors use your site. It isn’t necessary to write everything at once, but having a short list in mind will help you to keep creating relevant content every week.

Using Ahrefs

You don’t even need to be creative to get started on this one. Get Ahrefs and check out your competition. See what they’re writing about, see if you could do better. Better doesn’t necessarily mean longer or more complicated – it can be as straightforward as making an accompanying video or breaking down a tutorial into a step-by-step.

CTA

Every page of content on your site should have a relevant CTA or “call-to-action”. Think about what you’d like your visitors to do next and make the options really obvious with a simple button or form.

Writing articles

Once you have all the above, you’ll be ready to start writing pages of content for your WordPress website. Remember the brand, audience and ultimate CTA, then select from your list of titles and start on the headings. Writing the headings first helps to break up the task and gives structure to your content.

Once you’ve written a paragraph or so on each heading, it’s time to re-read and re-draft.

Break up with images, infographics and video

Add images and video to break up the content and keep it interesting for readers – especially those longer “deep dives” of 5,000 words or more. This is easier than ever if you’re already using the block editor (also known as Gutenberg). Your theme’s visual editor might also have nice ways to break up text with bullet points, lists and other formatting.

Outsourcing writing

If you’ve made your brand guidelines, customer profiles and shortlist of titles but have run out of time, you’re perfectly placed to outsource your content creation. Get in touch with Silicon Dales for content writing services or checkout one of the big platforms such as People Per Hour or Fiverr.

Book Silicon Dales to write your Content

Editing & Proofreading

Re-read your page and use the spelling and grammar tools in your WordPress visual editor, Google Doc, or the Word doc you’re working in.

Get software

There are heaps of useful spelling and grammar tools available such as Grammarly – currently a big favourite with ESL users.

Introduce a delay

Sometimes a break before re-reading can help you catch any clunky sentences or typos that the software didn’t spot.

Get a second pair of eyes

Even the best writers need an editor. Get a colleague or a proofreader to check and edit your piece. Book Silicon Dales to proofread and edit your web pages in the WordPress back-end. A service such as Scribendi will also offer round-the-clock editing services from a huge specialist team – great if you’ve got particular requirements in areas such as healthcare or academia.

100% Hands-Off

If you would like to get the content work done by someone else, book Silicon Dales to create a content strategy and publish relevant and compelling content in your WordPress website on a regular basis.
Book Silicon Dales for Content