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The Value of Content Writing
Content Writing is a pillar for every business around. What would a website look like without content? How could your business thrive if you don’t offer your visitors content?
As a content writer, you have to know your audience. It starts with knowing the purpose of the article or text you are going to write. Different information requires different writing styles. A blog post is more personal, while the news is more business-like. White papers appear to be written very much “to the fact” while blogs leave a lot more room for more personal opinions.
Structure for a content writer
we use four building blocks for any piece we write.
- The first is that we must know and understand your audience. Apart from asking around, we also produce the so-called buyer personas. A buyer persona is a portrait of a fictional person who could be a buyer of your products. An example is Sam. Sam is 45, a divorced mother of two. She loves to cook, works during the daytime as a lawyer, and plays the violin. Or take Tom, 34, in his early career. He hasn’t much education but works hard in his own construction business. He is not married and loves playing soccer. When you write your stuff, you’ll do so with this type of buyer personas in front of you. As a result, your texts will be written for your audience instead of for your product or service.
- The second important issue to know is which words your audience uses when they are trying to find you or your services. As a content writer, we must do keyword research to find this out. Of course, we will ask you about which words you, your customers, and your employees use when talking about the business. However, you would be surprised to learn that what seems logical for you to use is not that logical for everybody.
- A user of your site tends to scroll over the text. He is not reading it. He scans it for something interesting. So, the titles of your paragraphs must be enticing to attract his attention. As the average attention span of a person is relatively short, a few seconds, a title must be jumping out of the words.
- Lastly, we have to beware of plagiarism. As content writers, we read a lot. When we start with a text for you, albeit it an article or just a paragraph on your site, we have to be original using our own words. However, there is always the danger that we unintentionally use a phrase that is quoted initially earlier by someone else. To overcome this to happen, you still have to check your texts with a plagiarism checker. Examples of these are Grammarly and Unicheck to name a few.
What is better, long-form content or short-form content?
According to Google, short-form content is content shorter than 300 words. And as soon as your text goes beyond 800 words, Google sees it as long-form content.
However, this statement is not black and white. Your competition also plays a role here.
How? Easy, if no one in your industry writes articles with more than 200 words, than your article with 500 words will be characterized as long-form. On the contrary, in the industry of digital internet marketing, companies may write articles of 10,000 words. If you want to compete with them, you face a lot of writing and equivalent research to do.
Professionalism, relevancy and more chances
The two most important reasons to write long-form copy is that it shows your professionalism and expertise in your area of business. An interesting side effect is that as it takes a user longer to read a long-form article, their staying time at your site increases a lot. For Google, this is a positive ranking signal. Because, when people stay longer at your website, your site must show them relevant information. And because of that, your site might be attractive to more people. As Google is a search engine that wants to give its users the best possible search results, they will reward your site with a higher ranking.
The last advantage of writing long-form copy is that it gives more opportunity to paste relevant keywords more naturally.