What content should I have on my website?

So what content do I need on my business website?

This largely depends on what sector and service you are and whether you’re B2B or B2C or perhaps eCommerce, but we’ll look at the generics for this purpose. And if you choose to work with us, we can help you define them and assist with content writing.

Navigation

Spoiler alert – your company logo is perhaps the least important element here! Your website visitors want to be able to contact you easily, and also just as cars have 4 wheels, a steering wheel and doors in the same place, your visitors expect to see logo top left (centred works well too) and contact info on the right.

Make the contact information clear to see – include your phone number (don’t make your prospects hunt for it!) and consider this as a typical layout:

Logo (home button) | Services | Pricing | Customers (Reviews, case studies, testimonials) | Insights (we tend to use this over Blog these days) | About us / Why us | Contact

Homepage

Arguably the most important page on your website – your homepage. This is your dashboard for your business, the starting point to navigating the rest of the website. We’ll break it down into sections:

Value proposition

This is perhaps the single most important piece of content in your website. You have less than 2 seconds to make a good impression on your prospect, so whilst speed of page load and design are crucial too, summarising how you help people is the clincher.

We go into this in more detail in this article, but fundamentally, your value proposition needs to explain in as few words as possible what you do and how it benefits people.

The emotional trigger is key here – 99% of the visitors to your site have a pain problem to solve, so make sure they think ‘this is the company for me‘.

Good Logistics have a clear value proposition for their audience

Identify your audience

If you’ve already worked out your avatars this is easier, but if not (and we recommend you do), they may be types or demographics in a broad sense.

Estate agents have Sales + Lettings at top level, and within Sales you have Buyers and Sellers (who often will be doing both) and under Lettings you have Landlords and Tenants. Be a bit selfish here – which make you most money / are your core target?

Weight the content and hierarchy around them. In this example, the first thing we ask is ‘who are you’ so the customer journey is centred around that.

High up on their home page, this site we created for Good Travel gives clear paths for user types.

This brings us neatly onto services.

Your core services

Whilst many businesses will be focusing on a handful of core services, or maybe even one, group structures may offer many services.

And when you consider a business like ours that fundamentally offers Websites and Branding, under each of these pillars there are many other services such as hosting, SEO, photography etc. Think about which of your services are:

• The most profitable
• The easiest to sell
• The most in demand

You can show more services of course, but consider the hierarchy of information, and also revealing the other services on second or third tier pages on the site. Consider a short sentence or paragraph on each to prompt a click through.

Calls to Action (CTAs)

This is SO often overlooked! Prompt your prospects to contact you, explore your services, keep them on your site until they make an enquiry. Keeping users on your site reduces your bounce rate and if your content is easy to read and compelling, you’ll keep them on site until they enquire.

It’s also good to include Testimonials, Case Studies and Reviews on your homepage – but only show 2 or 3 of each, or the best one / latest one.

Using sliders on sites is becoming less popular for two main reasons – people are time poor and won’t swipe through them, and sliders often become bloated with heavy coding and content which impacts page loading.

Services

These can be very important pages on your website, and if optimised well, could be entry points to prospects looking for specific needs. Keep them engaging with good imagery, clear structure and make sure to include those all important CTAs.

The kind of content on your service pages can vary wildly, but if you have more than three services, consider a Services landing page that signposts the others.

Testimonials, Case Studies and Reviews

Depending on your business, you’ll want to consider all or at least some of these as they act as trust points for your prospect.

Some points to consider:

• Don’t show an entire customer testimonial – choose the one sentence that says it best.
• Again with case studies – choose a key pain point that was solved and highlight that, and if you are working in specific regions, show the region and also sector so prospective clients can see the range and breadth of your services.
• Encourage Google Reviews. They do well for your page rankings, and you can use widgets to display them on your website with a star rating. This is particularly important for B2C businesses. Encouraging happy clients to both leave a review and then participate in a case study is the ideal.

M&M Properties clearly show their reviews on their homepage.

Insights / News / Blog

Whatever you want to call it, this is going to bring long term value to your website. Think beyond your office move or new office pet (not to say don’t post about them however) and more about information and value for your customer.

We have moved to calling this section ‘Insights‘ as often it is giving useful information to a target audience, and when used correctly, can help position you as a market leader / expert in your field.

How to structure your insights:

• Start with a plan: think about what questions you get asked by clients and answer them; what articles will prospects find useful?
• Research your topic and enrich it with images, diagrams and anything else to keep it engaging
• Write as much as you can, as long as it’s relevant – aim for over 300 words at least, though well written articles could amass 1000–2000 words. The main thing to remember is write naturally, and whilst you should consider long-tail keywords, don’t ‘keyword-stuff’ as this can be detrimental to your search engine rankings.
• Ensure it is structured correctly with text hierarchy – intro text, headings and bullet points not only make for easier reading, but are better for overall structure.
• Use good feature imagery – sites such as Unsplash have great free imagery you can use, and Shutterstock has larger, paid royalty free imagery.
• Include CTAs to prompt action, and utilise exit popups to capture data.

About

An often overlooked webpage is your About Us page. Sometimes called ‘Why us’, this is your opportunity to give more insight into your ‘why‘ and also your ‘how‘ – consider how your experience helps solve customer pain points and this will reinforce why they should work with you.

We have a separate insight that covers what to include on your about us page.

Contact

An important page on your website, and it’s imperative that it is easy to follow and has all the necessary information on it:

• Contact form
• Phone number
• Address
• Map (if you have a physical destination)

It really doesn’t need much more than that, unless you have multiple locations in which case make it easy for your prospects to understand and find the correct one for them.

These are just the basics – as long as the content is relevant and useful, you can have as many pages as you need. Just remember not to overuse keywords and write naturally as if you were giving a presentation.