Want to Create Great Content? 6 Things To Check Before You Hit Publish

Posted on Oct 23rd 2015 in Content Marketing

In a bid to climb the search rankings and attract more customers to their websites, businesses are creating more content than ever before. But although publishing lots of new content to your resort’s website and social media pages is important, quantity alone isn’t enough to stand out in the hugely competitive online market.

If you want more of your guests to see, read and share the content you produce, you have to do more than simply fill the pages of your website with extra text.

So how do you know your content is up to scratch? This 6 point checklist is a great place to start.

1. Content is Free From Grammatical and Spelling Errors

This basic first step alone isn’t going to guarantee great content, but it is crucial.

Checking and re-checking for spelling and grammatical errors before you hit publish is more important than you might think. Research by translation and transcriptions experts Global Lingo has shown that almost three quarters of consumers notice small errors, while 59% of readers report that spelling and grammatical slip ups would make them think twice before purchasing from a website.

The takeaway? You can’t engage and inspire action without being correct. Take time to get the basics right.

2) Content is Optimised For Search

SEO has changed considerably in recent years, but taking time to ensure your content is easy for the search engines to crawl and your guests to find remains as important as ever.

Be sure to do some basic SEO on every blog article you create, including optimising your title, meta description and URL, internal link building and adding ALT text to any images you include.

3) Headline is Eye-catching and Engaging

The number one purpose of your headline is to get your guests to read the rest of the article. The majority of headlines fail in this task. Taking just a few moments longer to brainstorm creative and engaging titles can make a potentially massive difference to the level of engagement – and bookings- any single piece of content generates.

4) Text is Accompanied by High-Quality Images

Including an attractive image will catch your audience’s attention and help you deliver your message better. Adding a high quality image can also improve the appearance and design of your website, which is an important signal of credibility for a significant portion of online shoppers.

5) Content is Easy to Scan

Research suggests that most of us only read between 20% and 28% of a document – we’ll quickly scan the text for important information and only take time to read in more detail if we notice something particularly interesting or helpful.

If you present your audience with content that is not easy to scan, you can bet they’ll click away to the next article fast. Make sure your guests can find the information they’re looking for at a glance by breaking up large walls of texts with bullet points, subheadings, images and pulled-out quotes.

6) Content Includes a Compelling Call to Action

One of the primary aims of publishing content is to drive your readers to take action – preferably in the form of an email-list signup, social media follow, or better yet, a booking.

If you’ve managed to engage a reader’s interest to the point that they’ve read through an entire blog post, then you have a valuable opportunity to leverage that attention for further interaction with your resort. Don’t let that opportunity go to waste! Include a prominent call to action at the end of each article to tell your guests exactly what you want them to do next.

So there it is – a basic content checklist to look over next time you’re about to hit publish on a new blog post. Do you have any more points to add? Let us know in the comments below!