Texts are among the most essential elements of your website. The technology of your webshop may be excellent, but when there is no text, it is almost impossible for search engines to find your site. And when the search engine cannot find your website, users cannot either, and without users, there are no sales or lead generation. This article explains how to optimize your texts according to the 'desires' of the visitor and the search engine.
Where texts used to be written purely for search engines a few years ago, nowadays the user is central. Why this change? Due to a number of changes in Google's algorithm, also known as the Google Panda Update.
The goal of this update is to exclude websites with poor or little content from search results and to improve the quality of these results. Google measures this based on about twenty guidelines of which unique content, correct language and spelling, and the trustworthiness conveyed by the website are the most important. The user has thus become truly more important than the keywords. But how do you write a text that is both interesting for the user and can be found by Google?
1: Place the right keywords in the best spotA text can be very user-friendly, but it is still important to be present in those search results. To begin with, it is important to determine the right keywords per page using, for example, the Keyword Planner from Google. Once the keywords are established, the goal is not to cram the text with these words, but to find a good balance. In addition to the body text, you have many other options for using the keywords. How? You can see that in the image below.
When you use the title tag, the URL, and the H1 and H2-tags to incorporate your keywords, the body text does not need to be over-optimized anymore but can be written in a user-friendly way instead. This also makes writing web texts a lot more enjoyable. In addition to the aforementioned metatags , the metadescription is also very important. Not as a ranking factor, but to convince the visitor to click on your search result. What makes you stand out from the competition and why should someone choose your company? The title tag and metadescription are what you see in Google's search results.
2: Keep it readable
Someone reading online reads in a completely different way than someone reading a book or newspaper offline. Keep this difference in reading behavior in mind when writing web texts. An internet reader wants to be able to scan a web text and does not want to wade through blocks of text. What stands out? Are headings, paragraphs, and images used? Where does the attention get drawn? Ensure that the text on your website is immediately readable and that the visitor does not have to scroll to find it. A visitor who does not immediately find what they are looking for will leave right away. For you, ten others.
Another important aspect for the readability of a web text is to use grammar and spelling correctly. A text with errors leaves a poor impression, is unreadable, and does not inspire trust among your visitors.
3: Be uniqueOne of the most important factors for Google is unique content. An obvious concept, but its use is less obvious. If you work with certain brands or suppliers and want to mention something about them on your own website, it is all too easy to copy and paste existing text from that brand or supplier onto your own website. This is duplicate content and this form of content is not valued by Google. Additionally, you might as well save yourself the trouble because ranking with duplicate content has become not done since the introduction of the Panda Update. Duplicate content can not only exist across different websites, but it can also exist onsite. A website typically has many pages, and due to incorrect settings, many websites, especially webshops, often have (unintentionally) duplicate content online due to a filter or sorting function. You can find multiple causes of duplicate content in the blog article by Eric-Jan Dijks of Easy Internet Marketing. To prevent this form of duplicate content, you can ensure proper categorization or use the 'canonical tag'. This is an HTML element in the <head> where you can specify what the original version of a page is. It is important to place this tag on the duplicate pages, referring to the URL of the original version. This way, the search engine knows what the original version of the page is.
Another advantage of unique content is, of course, that a visitor has never read it anywhere else. When a user encounters the same content on multiple websites, they also no longer know who is authoritative and who is not. So, if you always ensure unique content, you gain the trust of your visitors.
4: Focus on the visitor
When you start writing texts, you will notice that you can talk about your company, products, and/or services a lot. But does the visitor really want to read all this information? It is important to put yourself in the visitor's shoes and critically assess your own texts. A visitor is looking for the specifications of a product, the results of a particular service, or the benefits of your company. Ensure these aspects are reflected in the texts as well. Being concise and to the point with your web texts is very important.
If you still want to elaborate on certain topics, then a whitepaper or a blog article might be a better idea. Those who are interested can delve deeper into the topic, while the rest can find the information they are looking for in the text on the relevant page. 5: Ask visitors for content A common excuse is 'no time', but you will also need to make time for writing texts. Additionally, there is of course ‘user generated content’, which literally means content generated by the user. Purely textually, you can think of reviews from users. The advantage of this is that it builds trust among other visitors and keeps your site supplied with fresh texts, which will show Google that you are actively engaging with your website. But in addition to text, users can also contribute content by making videos of your product or uploading an image of the clothing they purchased from your webshop. This really brings your website to life without you having to do too much.Source: Annemarie Koks
