5 top tips to make your content go further

Last week we published a piece on how important content is for making your website work harder for you and your business. At BHM Media we’re totally on board with this message and because we have previously worked as writers and journalists, we find it easy to churn content out (sorry, I don’t mean ‘churn’, obviously I mean craft well-written, quality content).

However, this week we have had a number of questions on how best to write content and what advice we can give to those dipping their toe into online marketing. We’re always happy to answer any questions at BHM Media, but I thought I’d put together some top tips that might make things easier.

1. Write for your audience

Identify who is – hopefully – reading your content and write for them. You are an expert in your field and you should convey that knowledge, but write for your prospective patient or client, not your peers. And don’t be afraid to add personality.

2. Grab their attention

To capture a visitor’s attention, you need to use a compelling headline just as they do in the newspapers. Also that title is what the search engines will pick up so it has to be relevant. One way of doing this is thinking of how your visitors might be searching for the services you offer. Rather than just typing in ‘boob job’ they might ask a question, such as, “How do I get a natural look with a breast augmentation?”, so reflect this in your titles.

3. Be careful with keywords

Establish in your mind what keywords you’d like to be optimising for – that might be a specific treatment in a specific area. Use phrases with these keywords so both the visitor and search engines can identify what your post is about, but be careful. Don’t stuff a piece indiscriminately with these keywords. You’ll turn off your visitor and can even get penalised by the powers that be.

4. Think about images

It’s not just the written word that’s important to both visitors and search engines. More people respond to images over text – which is why video can be so important – so you should incorporate images that are relevant in to your posts. Google provides search tools that can help you find copyright free images.

Remember, to give the images a title that corresponds to the keywords you’re aiming for.

5. Monitor what you’re doing

Google Analytics is a free and powerful tool that can help you track what all your hard work is achieving and show you how users are interacting with your site. It can help you fine tune the content you’re writing as ongoing posts and give you pointers on what you can do to your existing pages to improve them.

There are lots of other things that you should be doing with your content – proper tagging of articles into a hierarchy, meta descriptions and titles, going for the long tail – but we can cover these another day.

It’s your website, so you are the best person to be writing this content, but if you don’t have the time to update your site regularly, then we can provide well-written, quality content that is relevant to your specialty. If you have any other questions, give me a call on 07768 571493.

Katharine
BHM Media