What does good content actually look like?
"Content marketers talk a lot about writing good content or content that performs" says Forrest Brown "We whip out our tape measures and scales, poke and prod, and inspect every pixel on the screen for proper keyword targeting and density, alt text copy, calls to action, and appropriate messaging for funnel position. But Google is a fickle deity. It also wants people to have a good experience when viewing our content, and that means making our content as easy to use as possible."
Remember the first rule of content marketing:
Content is not art - it serves a clearly defined function
Content should answer a question, entertain the reader, or help someone make a decision.
How to write easy-to-use content
If you’re looking for ways to make your content more usable, think magazines, think how-to guides, think newspapers, think textbooks.
Honestly, think about it. Find your favorite magazine or grab a useful textbook from somewhere and look at how it's formatted. I guarantee every chapter or section will contain a table of contents, short paragraphs, maybe some highlighted boxes, glossaries to clarify concepts or terms, photos, diagrams and graphs to illustrate complicated concepts. It's brilliantly useful content.
Textbooks aren't fun - they're designed with the user experience and a purpose in mind.
8 ways to write easy-to-use content
I love BA's in-flight business magazine - I always pick one up or ask my husband/friends to pick up a copy when they travel. Why? It manages my expectations from the get-go. It even tells me how long it should take me to read a certain article.
(Good rule of thumb is 3 - 5 minutes for every 500 words by the way)
Make the useful stuff easy to find.
Whether it's on a webpage, a custom magazine or what... keep it simple.
HubSpot created a great checklist for improving site usability, which includes tips for improving visual hierarchy through properly formatted section headers, tables of contents, and other on-page elements if you want to have a nosy.
Use bullet points.
Bullet points look clean and punchy. If you have a list in a sentence, break it down into bullets.
Write short paragraphs.
Two to three sentences. Longer paragraphs are good when they help organize content or when people are scanning but long paragraphs with long stretches of text are tiring.
Use pictures, infographics, diagrams and other illustrations
People like pictures. Humans process visuals faster than text so use that to your advantage. Keep image size files low and activate lazy loading on your website.
Open links in a new tab.
Nobody likes it when they click a citation or other backlink and leave the original page. They lose their reading spot, which makes it more likely to give up on reading it altogether. In WordPress, click the option to open selected links in a new tab... If you’re writing markup in HTML, format your links like this: <a href=“website.com” target=“_blank”>anchor text</a>.
Write alt text.
As explained in the Moz SEO Learning Center, alt text is primarily for visually impaired visitors using screen readers, but it also displays when images don’t load properly. Search engine spiders also read alt text but that doesn't mean stuff it full of keywords. Keep it short, keep it interesting and always include a full stop at the end.
Craft concise meta descriptions.
Include your keyword(s) and clearly explain what the reader can expect from the content. (FYI Google doesn’t consider meta descriptions in its ranking algorithm, but good meta descriptions can increase click-through rates, which Google does look at.)
Hope this helps! I also really like this infographic so thought I'd stick it on the end of this blog in case it's useful to you! Enjoy!
