Content Marketing

What Is Good Website Content?

Name: Direct Online Marketing
Brand: Direct Online Marketing
Rating: 4.9 (44 reviews)

By Ryan Norman| 11 Min Read | October 15, 2024

What is good website content that is optimized for SEO and Google's Helpful Content Update

Good website content provides people with useful information and entices them to take action. This blog post explores how website owners can attain these dual objectives side by side, to both answer searchers’ questions and pitch them on using your product or service.

Table of Contents

Good Website Content Serves the Reader and the Writer

You know your brand. You believe you offer something of value to your clients. You need to get this message out there to share that value with others and to grow your business.

Your website is a conduit to reaching thousands upon thousands of people every day. The copy on your website is crucial. These words are the appeal to website visitors to buy from you; they are also scrutinized by search engines like Google when the algorithm serves up search results.

Fundamentally, you need to write pages that are useful to people. And immediately after that, you need to consider how those pages can be optimized for search engines because if your site is never seen, it’s not serving the reader, nor is it helping your business drive more sales.

Good Website Copy Has a Clear Goal

As we’re seeing, there are multiple priorities to manage with your website copy. You’ve got to keep in mind user interest, business objectives, and search engine visibility.

The best way to satisfy these priorities is often to focus on a specific goal with each piece of content or page you create. With a variety of kinds of content across your website, you can meet the needs of visitors, business, and SEO in different ways in different places—rather than grinding to a halt trying to do all three at once.

Broadly speaking, you can think of website copy as informational and transactional. Quality website copy answers questions and it compels purchases. And it does each of these things to a different extent depending upon the particular type of page that it will live on.

Start with a Specific Goal

Informational Ad Copy

An about us page is largely informational. This is a page where an organization lays out its reason for being and often communicates the broad strokes of the company’s history. An about us page usually sets for the unique value proposition of a company, but it does so plainly and briefly, without making a forceful, transactional push for a user to take action.

Transactional Ad Copy

On the other end of the spectrum is, for instance, a checkout page. You’ve already got a person who’s highly interested in your product because they have clicked through to the checkout page. Now you need to get the sale over the finish line with compelling copy that presents an irresistible argument for why the person should complete their purchase.

Information & Transactional Ad Copy

Most of the pages on a website live somewhere in the middle. A blog post (like this once) has a dual identity: it seeks to give expert information to interested users, and it seeks to subtly suggest to readers that they consider doing business with the company.

Knowing the Audience Is Key to Writing Good Website Copy

Writing into the void isn’t much use. Writing to the whole world also isn’t likely to be effective. Good website content aims at an audience, a particular demographic of people that would be best served by your content.

What questions are people asking?
How old are they?
What concerns do they have?
Why do they care about the things they do?
What economic bracket do they reside in?
What challenges do they face day to day that your organization might help them with?
Where do they live?
How much do they already know about your company?
Are there other solutions available besides the one you provide?

Ask yourself these questions within your business to get a sense for your audience. Then you’ll have a core set of concerns to write copy toward. You’ll have a feel for what life is like for your audience, so you can speak to them in familiar language that demonstrates your value to their individual circumstances.

Write Website Copy That’s Simple (But Not Simplistic)

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with someone who uses complex words just to sound smart? It doesn’t work—it confuses and alienates people. The same applies to writing for your website.

It’s not that you need to dumb down, just keep it clear and to the point. Use short sentences and common words to make your ideas easy to grasp. Don’t use an abstruse twenty-dollar word when a hard-working one-dollar word is readily available and familiar to all.

Make Your Website Content Scannable

People don’t read online—they scan. They skim. They skip around. They jump to the bottom and then jump back up. Rarely does text get read word-for-word on any website.

So help people out. Break your content into digestible chunks, use subheadings, and highlight key points with bullets or numbered lists. Big blocks of text can feel like an insurmountable wall to scale. Instead, you want your readers to feel like they’re strolling through a garden, able to stop and admire any flower that catches their eye.

Make sure the key points and main themes of the page are represented in headings. Use your H1s, H2s, and H3s to create an outline for the page. The message of the page should be clear from reading just the headings.

Follow the Guidance from Google’s Helpful Content Update

The copy that you painstakingly write for your website can only do its work if people can actually find it online. Hopefully you’ve crafted messaging that answers questions and suggests why your company provides a worthwhile solution. It’s especially import that you do so if you want to be found on Google since the search giant rolled out its Helpful Content Update in September 2023.

What Is Google’s Helpful Content Update

In September 2023, Google changed its search algorithm to deliver more human-made content in the midst of the proliferation of AI-generated content.

With the rise of AI writing abilities in platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, millions of webpages have been published that contain primarily AI-generated text. Many of these pages merely re-worded and re-organized text that was available from authoritative sources across the internet, which Google frowns on, and so Google has been downranking sites that feature such content.

In extreme cases, Google has stopped showing offending websites in its search results altogether.

Align Website Copy With Google’s Helpful Content Update

To stay on Google’s good side and maintain healthy rankings, you merely have to employ what we’ve already been discussing here as good practice in your content writing.

This takes hard work. But it doesn’t mean you have to revolutionize the way you create content. Ultimately the Google’s Helpful Content Update should prove a boon to reputable organizations—because with Google cracking down on unscrupulous sites that merely steal and re-package content, honest attempts to present valuable information will rise higher in the SERPs.

Demonstrate Authority and Use AI Wisely in Website Content

The power of AI tools being what they are, no site owner is likely to write all their copy from scratch anymore. The amount of content and the frequency with which AI can help is astounding.

AI tools are a good place to start in brainstorming topics for new content; they are a poor place to finish and merely publish exactly what is generated.

The surest path to better and sustained search rankings is to follow the principles of E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. And AI can help you follow that path more quickly as a writing assistant.

Implementing E-E-A-T means acting like the expert you are about your business. It means writing original, engaging content that details your history of success and clearly explains your value proposition to prospective clients.

Following these AI-writing DOs and avoiding the DON’Ts will put you on the right track. You’ll be implementing best practices that satisfy the E-E-A-T principles that matter to human readers and to Google (especially after the Helpful Content update of September 2023).

AI-writing DON’Ts

Don’t post verbatim what an AI tool generates.
- You may be putting out false information. The large language models behind AI tools are trained on text from all over the internet, not all of which is true. Plus, if you blindly post what AI gives you, you may be committing plagiarism. AI frequently provides factual information taken directly from authoritative sources, but it often does so without citing the source.
Don’t keyword stuff.
- You shouldn’t merely inject a particular word many times throughout your content in an attempt to get a page to rank for that word. Google’s algorithm is good at recognizing this tactic and will ding the page accordingly.
Don’t let AI flatten your voice.
- You have a unique voice. Your content should reflect that. Merely posting what AI produces can lead to bland content that doesn’t entice people to take action.

AI-writing DOs

Polish each sentence with human input.
- Revise, edit, rephrase, change punctuation—do something to change each sentence so that you don’t publish anything to your site that is just a regurgitation of an AI tool.
Regularly publish content.
- Build a reputation in the mind of your clients (and in the view of Google’s search algorithm) that your site is an active, continual fountain of useful information.
Include an author bio.
- Attribute content on your website to the person who wrote it and demonstrate their expertise. The goal is to get your people recognized by name in Google’s mind as experts. So avoid putting a byline of just contributor or company name.

Good Website Content Is Attainable

With some elbow grease and a bit of help from AI, generating quality copy for your website on a consistent basis is well within reach.

Good content is content that people want to read. It’s content that is informative, engaging, and persuasive. It’s content that helps people solve problems, answer questions, or make decisions.

At Direct Online Marketing, we’ve helped hundreds of clients expand their footprint online with content marketing and SEO services. We’ve learned from the best (and the less than stellar) examples of web content.

To get our thoughts on how to grow your marketing success in light of Google’s Helpful Content Update, contact DOM for a free strategic audit of your website content.

Key Takeaways

Good website content serves both the reader’s needs and the business’s objectives, ensuring information is useful and persuasive.
Writing with a specific goal in mind for each page helps balance user interest, business objectives, and search engine optimization.
Understanding your audience allows you to tailor content that speaks directly to their questions, concerns, and circumstances.
Clear, scannable, and simple website copy helps users quickly find the information they need while keeping them engaged.
Aligning your content with Google’s Helpful Content Update by demonstrating expertise and using AI carefully ensures better search rankings and reader trust.