How To Rewrite Website Content 101

Writing is not everybody’s cup of tea. So how does a businessman accustomed to trading and product jargon rewrite website content to make it more appealing to the public online? Don’t worry for here are the basics to help you get started with such a challenging task.     

How do I rewrite website content?

Rewriting website content involves a five-step process. These are: planning, writing, submitting or feedbacking, polishing, and finalizing.

1. Plan

Every businessman knows that every action, to be successful, requires a plan. Having a plan makes it easier to identify your goal in conducting the rewrite. The plan also ensures that the team you are working with is moving towards the same goal as yours.

In line with this, The Clever Copywriting School recommends conducting a content audit as part of your plan in rewriting website content. The audit aims to identify what part of the website needs to be retained, consolidated, simplified, and updated with missing information.

The audit will also allow you to formulate the description of each page that needs to be rewritten in a way that conveys value for visitors and possible clients.

The results of the audit will help you create a content map for your website, which is useful in visualizing the flow of the user’s experience. It will also make it easier for you to see the cohesiveness of your content.

The school also suggests creating a project brief that would serve as a guide when rewriting the content. The brief should answer the following questions:

a) What keywords should be used?

b) Is the content Google-friendly?

c) Are the title, headers, content, meta description, and images SEO-compliant?

d) Does it engage the reader enough to its desired call-to-action?

e) Is the content easy to read and understand?

f) Does it clearly convey your business’ advantage over competitors?

g) Does it contain relevant images to accompany the copy?

h) Is the content not redundant or not repeated elsewhere on the website to avoid a visitor’s annoyance or frustration?

2. Write

Coming out with a plan, makes it easier for you or your team to actually sit down and rewrite the content of your website. There are just some pointers I’d like to share on this, which I will discuss in a little while.

3. Submit

This part of the process requires you to have someone else read what you have come up with to avoid prejudices and biases in your work.

Plus, it is best to submit it to an editor or a business colleague who could provide you with objective commentary. This will allow you to check if your output adheres to your plan.

If your team or a hired writer is doing the rewrite for you, this would require them to submit the material to you for your comments. This will allow you to similarly check if it complies with the plan you have provided them a copy of.

4. Polish

After submitting the material for comments, it would then be best to integrate what changes need to be made. Then polish the material before submitting it again to your colleague or having the writer submit it to you.

5. Finalize

The last phase of the process is finalizing the rewritten material and uploading it to your website. It would be good to check if the changes in the content affect site performance and business sales after six months, at least. Repeat the process if necessary until your targets are achieved.

What pointers do I bear in mind when I actually rewrite the website content?

Preparing to rewrite website content may be tedious but worthwhile. Now you are aware of the rewriting process, here are some other pointers I suggest you bear in mind for your website’s content:

1. Make it captivating through your headline

2. Make it scannable or easy to understand and read at a glance. Don’t be afraid to present the topic in a bulleted format and to break down long sentences and paragraphs into new ones.

3. Make it conversational and engaging

4. Make it clear and consistent with the rest of the website’s content

5. Make it easy on the eyes and ears through short, simple sentences and wordings.

6. Make it timely.

Why rewrite website content in the first place?

I find five main reasons that a website’s content needs to be rewritten. Often, this could be to fine-tune the content of a current website, migrate to a new website, and enhance the quality of the content. Other reasons include making content more relevant or timely and as part of the overall marketing strategy.

1. Fine-tuning content

Content Strategy Inc. explains that rewriting website content is not a matter of merely rephrasing what is written. It also requires ensuring that each page of the website has a unified tone with its entirety, is reader-friendly, incorporates branding, and implements SEO guidelines.

This impacts the quality of your website’s overall visitor experience which, in turn, affects your business’ credibility and sales.

Thus, a website that is rich in content, such as an electrician’s website, may require regular fine-tuning of content to avoid overwhelming people with information. This is especially true if a lot of trade jargon is used, which needs to be rewritten for your target market to easily understand.

2. Migrating content

Another reason content needs to be rewritten is when the entrepreneur has decided to create a new website for the business. There may be pages or sections of the old website that needs to be integrated into the new website but have a different tone or approach than before. Thus, the need to rewrite the content.

3. Enhancing content

On the other hand, a more common reason a business needs to rewrite website content is the poor quality of how it was written before. Not all businessmen, as earlier mentioned, have the skill to write. It is probable that when the business started, the website’s content was written by the owner.

The owner might have also hired someone with poor writing skills based on what his or her budget allowed at the start. With the business already established, it is necessary that one’s online presence also upgrades in quality beginning with the quality of the website’s content.

4. Updating content

Similar to the growth of a business, the content of a website needs to be updated on product information, service features, organizational setup, and what-have-yous.

This may also entail making the content more relevant to the website’s readers by removing passe information or outdated procedures, especially if these are scientific ones.

Adapting the tone and style of writing to the realities of the times, current business practices, people’s mindsets, and changing cultures are other reasons a website’s content needs to be rewritten.

5. Aligning content

Finally, another important reason website content needs to be rewritten is to adapt it to the company’s marketing strategy over a given period of time. Most marketing strategies these days maximize the power of the internet to drive sales and influence consumer behavior.

Marketers would often look to a website’s bounce rate to see how long visitors stay to view or interact with their pages and what particular areas in the content they are interested in.

If a website’s bounce rate is high, this means that people are not finding what they are looking for and prefer to look for it elsewhere. There is then the need to rewrite content to sustain visitors and direct them accordingly within the website for the information or product they need.

Since SEO has become so powerful, websites created half a decade or so ago must be rewritten to conform to successful strategies that drive site traffic and online visibility in search engines.

Marketers have to be constantly on the lookout for whether the website is at par with their target SEO performance. If not, a website rewrite might be needed to augment it.

This means checking whether a web page’s title, meta tags, and actual content meet the keywords they have assigned to the business, product, or service to attain SEO performance levels.

The marketers also check if there is a call-to-action present in each webpage through its content so that visitors will be driven to purchase or avail of service through it.

Of course, marketers also need to ensure that branding components are implemented throughout the website’s content. The copy of a website should also conform to current marketing campaigns in place.

What are the limitations and risks encountered when one needs to rewrite website content?

By now, I believe the importance of rewriting website content has become clearer to you. It would also be good to mention the limitations and risks involved in this process.

There is a tendency to sacrifice the quality of content when hiring a different writer for each rewriting need of your website. It would be best to have an in-house team that would employ writers trained according to your communication policies and marketing strategies.

Having an in-house team would also avoid the possibility of committing plagiarism should a hired writer simply copies content from a competitor.

On the other hand, limitations on rewriting website content should also factor in the country or location of a visitor such that it adapts their culture, mindset, and even language used when appropriate and possible.

In A Nutshell

Rewriting website content is a very challenging task that requires your full attention, priority, and budget. The investment you put in it will surely help provide you with a better business identity online and more profitable sales.

FAQs

1. Do all businesses need to rewrite website content?

No, not necessarily. Rewriting website content is dependent on a business’s needs and goals. TextCortex.Com highlights that a website’s performance is a good indicator for a business to decide whether or not to rewrite its content.

2. Are there tools available for businesses to rewrite website content?

Yes, there are tools designed to help businesses in rewriting website content. Some of these tools are for paraphrasing, title generators, keyword identifiers, and editors or proofreaders. In general, these tools are called Artificial Intelligence tools such as TextCortex, Co-schedule, Grammarly, SpinRewriter, TheBestSpinner4, and CleverSpinner, among others.

If you have other questions on how to rewrite website content or any other concern, feel free to message me any time. I’ll be happy to assist you