15 Best Practices For Creating Website Content To Attract Leads

With the right content, businesses can generate interest among prospective customers and attract leads to their websites. However, given ever-changing search engine algorithms, the owned media that lives on your site needs to be of high quality to rank near the top of search results and drive traffic.

In essence, the more online audiences organically engage with your content, the more Google and others will prioritize it, which helps more online searchers find it. Here, 16 experts from Forbes Agency Council discuss best practices marketers can follow to ensure they get the traffic, leads and results they seek.

1. Offer A Mix Of Content Assets

Offer a mixture of content assets, all related to the same theme and designed to attract and educate prospects along the buyer’s journey. By linking these content assets together through a central solutions page that helps visitors easily find the content they need, you’ll rank higher with search engines. – Wendy Covey, TREW Marketing

2. Create Buyer Personas

Think like your customer by creating buyer personas. It’s nearly impossible to create marketable content successfully without first understanding who your audience is, how they behave and what motivates their buying habits. Utilize your own data and research to build buyer personas that provide insights into the habits, attitudes and needs of the leads you hope to attract. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media

3. Know What People Are Searching For

Sometimes the best results come from back engineering. In this case, it’s about digging into Google search and finding out what people in your industry have been looking for. Often it’s about going for niche or long-tail topics instead of just hustling after the latest, high-ranking trend. – Lars Voedisch, PRecious Communications

4. Make Your Content Educational

The best content is educational in nature. Rather than trying to sell your product or service directly, you should be providing answers to the questions that your audience is asking. Put yourself in their shoes, and then work backward to help bring them to your site. – Jason Wulfsohn, AUDIENCEX

5. Be Authentic And Give Real Value

Do your best to be authentic and give real value. If your customers’ first impression of your content is low, how can you expect them to come back and buy from you? Where content marketing is concerned, quality always matters. – Lee-Ann Johnstone, AffiliateINSIDER

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6. Always Know Your Audience

The first rule of content is to always know your audience. Are they looking for information or inspiration? Explanation or vision? Once you know what they want, demonstrate how you fulfill that need efficiently and effectively. Simplicity in communicating that is crucial to satisfy the audience’s desire for clear answers. – Christoph Kastenholz, Pulse Advertising

7. Know Your Competition

Knowing your competition is key. One of the most important things to do is ensure that you are able to access all of the competition’s website analytics. One particular tool that is great for this is Spyfu. It is not free, but it is one of those tools that will allow you to know what you need to know. – Jon James, Ignited Results

8. Address Your Prospects’ Main Objection

Make sure that the content addresses the main objection your prospective clients or customers pose during the sales process. As simplistic as this may sound, if you disarm people by answering their biggest objection up front, you are flattening the playing field and removing barriers to entry—engagement personified. – Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency

9. Let Your Customers Tell Your Story

Rather than hyping your product in your content, make your customers the heroes, with your product as a supporting player in their hero’s journey. That is content your prospects can identify with and trust. – Scott Baradell, Idea Grove

10. Help, Inspire And Be Honest

The rules of creating content suitable for inbound marketing are simple: Be helpful, be inspiring and be honest. You have to give something of value to receive attention from your target market as you work to establish thought leadership in your industry. Your content has to be on-brand and relate to your products and services. – Carey Kirkpatrick, CKP

11. Be Timely With Your Content

Now more than ever, you need to be timely with your content. Make it about your potential customers (not about your brand) by creating content that is solution-based. Speak directly to your target audience and address their needs, their problems and the benefits they will gain. Make them the center of your content’s universe. – Bernard May, National Positions

12. Maximize SEO Strategy And Get Visual

Two things are critical: Maximizing your SEO strategy and getting visual with your content to capture and win short attention spans. Too many organizations create tremendous written content that lacks any kind of underpinning SEO analysis and related content strategy. It’s not just the “wow” factor of the content that drives results, but also the technical acumen. – Peter Prodromou, Boston Digital

13. Create Dedicated Product/Service Pages

My best piece of advice for those attempting to increase traffic to a website and increase lead generation through that would be to create product/service pages on your website. Most businesses offer a product and/or service. Due to their relevance, having web pages dedicated to explaining said products and services will increase the likelihood of search engines showing your site to end users. – Garrett Atkins, VIE Media

14. Focus On Your Visuals

One of the best practices when it comes to creating content that successfully attracts traffic to your website and generates qualified leads is to focus on your visuals. You can stop users’ scrolling by adding attention-grabbing thumbnails and people smiling and being sure to incorporate some of the most compelling elements early on to capture attention, generate website traffic and qualified leads. – Jonathan Durante, Expandify Marketing Inc

15. Build Content Around A Focus Keyword

Have a focus keyword you’re trying to rank for and build your content around that. Research the Google traffic volume for that focus keyword to ensure that it has volume. I call this matching user search intent. You should be answering a question that readers need answered in their Google searches. Google displays a People Also Ask (PAA) box feature that answers questions related to users’ search queries. – Michael Fox, Corberry Digital

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Author: Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member