Clear concise content

Writing with clarity is the best thing you can do for your website.

It shouldn't be a big surprise but for many people, experienced marketers included, writing clear, concise online content as the number one way of improving SEO, sales and customer retention is a real shock. 

We have a theory at What Are Words Worth, that it's because we've all become slaves to the algorithm. We believe to get on top of search must be complicated, therefore there has to be a trick to it. 

Surprise, surprise the trick is to write it well, using simple language, explaining what you do and who you do it for.

By making your site or blog lively, readable and engaging you make it sticky, and only when you have the viewer's interest do you need to start explaining how you do it.

If you've ever found a site and wondered what on earth it is the company does, they have failed!

A major sporting event we were involved with worked hard to win a new title sponsor; for the entirety of their 5 year sponsorship we couldn't work out, no matter how often we read their website and literature, what they actually did.

Ask yourself, are you that organisation? Is your content over complicated? Do you inform site visitors in simple terms what it is you do?

Or does your site use jargon and acronyms? Does it make assumptions about visitors levels of knowledge about you? Does it actually make them click away - probably to a competitor?

The key to retaining site visitors, and ultimately turning them into customers, is to write content using simple, natural language, easily readable and understandable by a visitor. 

We're trained as content creators to write prose that can be easily understood by a 12 year old, which may not be a bad rule of thumb.

We prefer though to think of our readers as busy people, fellow human beings, seeking to discover valuable information as quickly and as easily as possible.

In the next What Are Words Worth blog we'll look at the Top 10 Rules for writing great web content.