Google’s announcement of Core Web Vitals sent a shock wave through the internet. Everyone related to creating and ranking websites anxiously read and debated these new metrics.
They should have seen that nothing is about to change.
For the last decade or more, Google has been informing website managers and owners that they should focus on providing valuable, engaging content to their visitors. Google’s Core Web Vitals are - yet again - a tweak to help ensure exactly that.
If you’re already offering engaging content, you should be rewarded by Google’s coming updates. If not, it’s not too late to update your existing content and make it more engaging. Even without Google’s updates, focusing on engaging content helps you convert more and better, and keeps readers coming back to what you have to say.
Forget snippets, boxes, and code tweaks. Engaging content means writing for your readers instead of strictly for keywords or other details, such as the length of a text. When you write towards keywords instead of your readers, the text becomes less appealing to your readers - something Google can tell.
Engaging content…
To get there, you need a clear vision of your reader and the journey they should take to adopt your product. Asking the following questions will help you determine their journey:
This understanding begins with listening to your readers. Draw insights from:
Only then can you tap into the audiences’ problems and points of view, learn their language, and establish the start of their journey.
When you start writing, be comfortable with the process. Let your ideas to ‘thaw out’ through outlines or a mind map. Then, just write without listening to your internal critic. Let your sentences simmer.
When you go back to your initial writings, don’t be afraid to weed out cliches, play with word orders, and make your own voice shine through in the content. Make the jokes you’d make in person and when you read your text aloud, make sure you don’t sound like someone else.
The first impression of a text makes the biggest difference. Spend most of your efforts on the beginning. Your headline and lead should be the most engaging part of your text. You can use engaging techniques to truly capture your audience, such as asking questions.
Also make sure you adapt your style to the type of content you’re writing. A blog post such as this exact one is a great form for expository content (where you explain a concept - most of the blog posts you write as a marketer fall here), but if you lean towards a more narrative form of content, you can much more easily incorporate video, images, or sound. A piece of content that needs to convince can work really well in the form of a video slideshow, where you take your audience through the main points of the data.
Your CMS is the vehicle that gets your reader from one wellspring to the next. Publishing any piece of content, like a blog post, is no longer a single moment in time, but one of many waypoints for your readers on their journey with you.
Invest CMS that integrates your content with the rest of your martech stack. Take these examples of content you already create that need to timely in order to be relevant to the reader.
Each of these can be a pain when you’re using the wrong CMS or a mere afterthought with our all-in-one solution.
If you’ve had a conversation with your clients before, you’ve listened. If you’ve listened, you know what language they speak. If you speak their language when you write, they will in turn listen to you. You’ve got the expertise and the audience, so all you need to do is put pen to paper and show your clients that you’re listening.
Our CMS can turn your website into a personalized experience that engages your audience in the approach that best suits them. On top of that, we make sure nothing stands in the way of delivering your best content to your audience.
Looking for more information on how to make your websites more engaging?
