7 Strategies for Creating Informative Website Content

Anne Stefanyk, Guest Blogger

This guest article was written and submitted by Anne Stefanyk, Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studio. Please see the end of this article for Anne's bio.

By: Anne Stefanyk

A professional-looking website will only take you so far in your audience engagement goals. Creating a website that acts as a true educational resource for your audience will increase online engagement, enhance your brand’s reputation, and ultimately earn more support for your organization. 

Let’s look at seven effective ways to develop informative website content that educates and inspires your audience. 

1. Survey your target audience.

Your website’s content should be created with your target audience’s needs and interests in mind. Engaging, relevant content will bring visitors back to your website again and again as they seek answers to their pressing questions about what your organization does and how to get involved. 

The easiest way to determine what type of educational content your audience is interested in is simply to ask! Send a survey to your email subscriber list asking for their input on your website’s content. 

For example, let’s say you want to create better digital content on your nonprofit website for an audience of volunteer managers. Ask questions like:

• What are your core concerns when it comes to volunteer management?
• What types of content do you prefer? Check all that apply: Videos, long-form written blog posts, photo essays, audio stories/podcasts, interactive content (quizzes, polls, etc.) 
• What types of existing content do you like the most on our blog?

Focus on creating informative content that delivers value to your audience. This approach will naturally help you recruit more consistent blog readers who may eventually become long-term members or supporters of your organization.

2. Interview experts.

Interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) allows you to take your educational website content to the next level. Incorporating insights from SMEs offers the following benefits: 

• Improve your reputation as a thought leader in your industry. For example, let’s say you're developing content for school outreach. Including interviews with highly-regarded museum educators, teachers, and other school administrators can show other organizations in your industry and your target audience that your organization is on the cutting edge of museum education trends and best practices. 
• Provide more accurate, reliable information for audience members. Readers like to know that they’re getting information straight from a primary source with years of experience in their field—exactly the type of insights SMEs have. 
• Enhance your website’s Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness (EEAT). This is a component of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a handbook that Google contractors use to assess the reliability of search results. Incorporating EEAT gained from interviews with experts into your content signals to search engines that your website is a credible information source. 

Now that you know the benefits of gathering information from SMEs, use these tips to make the most of your conversations with them: 

• Identify subject matter experts from inside or outside your organization. For instance, SMEs could be experts you have on staff, individuals from prominent universities, or leaders at professional organizations in your field. 
• Set up an in-person or video interview. This will allow you to have a casual, free-flowing conversation to take a deep dive into the topic. 
• Come to the interview prepared with specific questions. Put yourself in your audience members’ shoes to think about the questions they may have for the SME. You can also use brainstorming tools like ChatGPT to help come up with questions. However, make sure the questions you choose are actually insightful—challenge yourself to go beyond basic, generic ideas to get to the heart of what matters to your audience. 
• Record the interview to ensure you have all the information you need. It’s easier to have a natural conversation when you record the interview since you don’t have to worry about writing down everything the expert says. 
• Put your editor hat on to find the most important information. Review your SME interview transcript to find the most useful information to include in your content. Don’t worry about including everything the interviewee shared—just choose a few key moments to build a cohesive narrative around the main topic. 

 Ask SMEs for access to any studies or data they or their colleagues have published that you can link to within your content. This way, you can support your interviews with reliable sources that audiences can use to learn more about the topic. 

3. Gather credible data and infographics.

Supplement your SME interviews with additional hard data from reliable sources. This includes: 

• Statistics
• Charts
• Graphs
• Maps

Resources like the Pew Research Center, Google Dataset Search, Google Scholar, and the U.S. Census Bureau are great places to look for accurate, credible data. 

Display data using visualizations like infographics, animations, and videos. Videos in particular are a great way to share this information—research shows that including video on a web page can can increase time spent on the page by 88%. 

NXUnite by Nexus Marketing’s video production guide recommends creating an explainer video to “educate supporters on key concepts.” Working with a professional video company will likely be your best bet to create professional-looking videos that align with your goals. 

4. Use the inverted pyramid strategy.

The inverted pyramid strategy is a journalistic concept that involves starting with the most important information to capture your audience’s attention and deliver the need-to-know facts. Then, subsequent information is organized from most to least important as you read further into the content.

With this in mind, it can be helpful to start your educational blog posts with: 

• A compelling direct quote
• An attention-grabbing statistic
• A powerful photo

For example, perhaps you’re writing a blog post for a nature center website about the resurgence of monarch butterflies in your community. You could start the post with an eye-popping statistic, such as “Did you know that the monarch butterfly population increased tenfold in our community this year?” Then, you could include a line graph showing the increase in butterfly populations over a five-year period to provide context for the change before diving into the reasoning and implications of it. 

5. Focus on your tone.

Your tone impacts the way your audience views your educational website content. The right tone can help form stronger bonds with website visitors, helping them further their understanding of complex topics. 

Use these strategies to perfect your tone: 

• Choose a unifying tone and apply it consistently across your website. Whether you want to come across as a supportive friend or a kindly professor, choose one tone for your content and leverage it evenly throughout your site. Keep in mind that a casual, conversational tone tends to make a better impression because it makes your content more approachable and accessible to a wider audience. 
• Be mindful when using industry jargon. Consider your audience’s relative familiarity with different topics when determining whether to use industry jargon. Kanopi’s WordPress and content optimization guide recommends using “simple, plain language” wherever possible. If you include jargon or industry acronyms, consider defining the terms or spelling them out to further your audience’s understanding. 
• Be concise. There are plenty of popular quotations about the importance of being concise, with “brevity is the soul of wit” being perhaps the most well-known. But the old cliche is true—the more succinct you can make your content, the more engagement you’ll receive because audiences want easy, immediate access to need-to-know information.

Above all, your website’s tone should be authentic and genuine. Stay true to your organization’s values and perspective to guide your tone. If you need help, ask yourself “Does our content sound like it was written by a real person with a genuine passion for the topic?” 

6. Optimize the technical aspects of your content.

Cleaning up the technical aspects of your website’s content will help make the content easier to navigate for both users and search engines. Keeping these SEO best practices at the forefront of your content strategy will ensure your well-written, informative content can reach the largest possible audience: 

• Make sure your content has a meta description and meta title.
• Include alternative text for images.
• Give your content a hierarchical, logical structure using headings and subheadings.
• Ensure your content’s visual look and navigation structure are consistent with your brand and other website pages.

Conduct regular website maintenance to maintain performance and security. Keep your CMS platform up to date with new version releases, check for broken links, and test your forms by manually completing them. This will ensure that your site stays secure, your content loads quickly, and your visitors can deepen their involvement with your organization by engaging with conversion opportunities. 

7. Assess your performance.

Track your website content’s performance to iterate on your successes and better serve your audience. Monitor engagement metrics such as:

• Time on page
• Bounce rate
• SEO rankings
• Conversions

These will help you understand whether your content is easy to find, engaging, and effective for converting website visitors into members or supporters of your organization. 

In addition, directly ask for feedback from your audience members to gauge how effectively your content serves their needs. Send a survey to your email subscribers with questions like:

• How frequently do you read our blog?
• What recent blog posts were most helpful and engaging to you?
• What multimedia content styles that we currently use are most engaging to you? 
• Do you have any suggestions for additional topics we should cover? 

Compile responses, note any trends or patterns in feedback, and use that input to adjust your content strategy. Then, follow up with respondents letting them know how you used their insights to provide more relevant, engaging content for them. 

Implementing these tips will lay the foundation for a strong content strategy that keeps your audience engaged and informed about important issues and updates from your organization. Treat content creation as a cyclical process where you continuously survey your audience to understand their content interests, create and optimize your content, and test it to assess its effectiveness.

About the author - Anne Stefanyk

As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions.

Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.

https://twitter.com/Anne_Kanopi

https://www.drupal.org/u/annabella

https://www.linkedin.com/in/annestefanyk/