So, you’ve got your new website all designed and it’s looking incredible. The layout is smooth and sleek, the colour scheme perfectly reflects your brand and the whole thing catches the eye in a way that is sure to impress your visitors.

A wise man once said that ‘Design in the absence of content is not design, but decoration’. In other words, no matter how good your site looks, it won’t produce the kind of results you need until you combine that design with well-written content, attractive images and other media that will not only lure in those visitors to your site, but compel them to take action when they get there, and keep them coming back for more.

The good news is that adding content to your site isn’t all that hard. If you’re using a website builder, it’s simply a case of dragging and dropping your words, pictures and media into place. If you’ve built your site using a Content Management System (CMS), it takes little more effort than clicking a few buttons, pasting and uploading.

Easy, right? Of course it is, but that still begs the question of how to create content that really achieves the results you’re looking for. With that in mind, here’s a few of our top tips for creating better content for your new website.

Use descriptive headings

It can be all too tempting to let our creativity run away with us when writing the text for our website, but it often pays to hold back a little and concentrate on creating headings that accurately describe to our visitors what’s on the page they’re about to view.

After all, the heading is the first thing seen not only by your visitors, but also by search engines. So if you sell leather jackets for men, say so in your heading.

People are far more likely to click through to your page if they know exactly what to expect when they get there.

Write for humans, not search engines

That said, it can be just as easy to get carried away in trying to make our copy appeal too much to the search engines. After all, we’ve all read about the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and ensuring our site reaches the first page of search results, so it can be pretty tempting to start loading every other sentence with keywords and phrases designed to send our sites higher up the rankings.

Conversely, this can have the opposite effect than the one we’re looking for as search engines like Google actually penalise overly-SEO’d content and reward those who create content with human beings in mind.

That’s not to say that keywords are not important, but rather that they should be used sparingly.

Avoid generic images (and stolen ones!)

Your website needs pictures, but heading to Google Images and stealing the first few that look good enough is exactly that, stealing. 90% of the time, those images belong to somebody, and if you use them without permission, you could find yourself in trouble.

Try to avoid overly-used, generic stock photos too. Even if you buy them legally from a photo library, you’re still using images that can probably be found on countless other websites, and who wants their new site to look just the same as everybody elses?

Instead, go for unique, original images that show real people actually out there delivering the service you provide, or of the products you sell.

Don’t forget your Calls to Action

When a potential customer visits your site, you want them to take action, so tell them. Whether it’s making a purchase, contacting you for more information or signing up for your newsletter, point them in the right direction and actually ask them to take that action.