Writing for the web requires developing a solid content strategy—also known as “content marketing”—to define clear and specific goals. Writing for the web isn’t exactly the same as writing for traditional journalism. While the web borrows techniques and methods from print writing and journalism, web writers have had to adapt them to these new mediums—screens—and the practices that come with them. But what constraints do writers face today? What traditions have been passed down from journalistic writing? And what similarities exist between these two types of writing?

What exactly is engaging content?

Writing content is good. Writing relevant and engaging content is even better. To that end, traditional journalism has provided us with some best practices for writing that are worth knowing.

Let's first take a look at the commonalities that journalism has passed on to web writing.

Step 1: Attract the reader and capture their attention.

Step 2: Provide him with information to entertain him or teach him something.

The goal remains the same, regardless of the platform: to provide high-quality content to build customer loyalty.

Some best practices for content writing include:

Knowing how to prioritize information. We'll come back to that a little later.
Understand the principle of proximity. In practical terms, readers will feel more connected to a story if the action takes place close to home. This proximity can be geographical, but it can also be temporal, emotional, or related to social context.
Be precise and concise. The reader doesn't have time to waste. They are constantly bombarded with information and want to get straight to the point.
Know how to write a headline. Before it’s read, content has to be seen. The headline has a real visual impact.
Remember to illustrate your points. Whether it's photos, drawings, or charts, an illustration will help readers understand the message you're trying to convey more easily.
Master the art of storytelling. It’s simply about knowing how to tell a story. This communication method allows you to captivate the reader and evoke emotions in them, leaving a lasting impression and creating a unique connection between you and the reader.

To make your content engaging online, be sure to post regularly so you stay top-of-mind with your readers and establish a routine and regular check-ins with them. Don’t hesitate to diversify your articles, both in terms of content and format. Create interactive content that makes readers feel involved and heard.

Case Study

We work with Rossel Est Médias to create content for newspaper headlines, supplements, and magazines, as well as for brand content projects led by the media group.
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SEO: Why Don't We Just Target Search Engines?

When writing for the web, you have to meet SEO requirements set by web crawlers, including Googlebot, Google’s well-known crawler. The problem with Google is that its algorithms are constantly changing, so you have to be responsive and stay on top of the latest developments.

At one time, simply including a keyword as many times as possible on a page was enough to rank well and appear at the top of Google search results. Today, however, this method—also known as over-optimization or keyword stuffing—is penalized by search engines.

As the saying goes, “ content is king ,” but Google’s algorithms can only detect the presence of keywords—not the relevance or added value of content. Only users can determine the true value of content. That’s why it’s so important to optimizethe user experience as much as possible.

Because the whole point of SEO is to appeal to both search engine algorithms and human users—and to make sure both groups understand you! You need to put yourself in the shoes of a web user and understand which keywords interest them and what answers they’re looking for. Your writing and keyword selection will then need to be centered around that answer. Mastering SEO requires a strong command of language.

When it comes to SEO writing, putting yourself in the user’s shoes is essential. This requires a genuine effort to empathize. Before you even start writing, the first step is to figure out who you’re writing for. To do this, we need to create our “personas”—that is, profiles of our target audience that outline their interests, motivations, constraints, and needs. But sometimes, reaching out to potential customers is also necessary to better understand their expectations and address them as precisely as possible.

All of these constraints require compliance with technical criteria imposed by the bots, as well as psychological criteria that enable the display of empathy toward internet users.

In short, writing for SEO is above all the art of striking the right balance between robots and humans.

“Don’twrite in a journalistic style. Practice journalism. It’s not a style but a way of working.”

— Syphaïwong Bay

The Importance of the Lead and the Structure of a Text

The lead, or “chapô,” summarizes the main message of your text and entices readers to learn more. The lead should both inform the reader and encourage them to keep reading the rest of the article. To do this, it should be short—just a few simple sentences are enough—and include the main keyword related to the article’s topic.

It’s therefore important to be careful when writing your content to choose keywords and phrases that internet users are likely to use in their searches. Also, remember to vary your keywords. To do this, feel free to use keyword research tools such as SemRush or YourTextGuru. Knowing how to analyze search trends is very effective as part of an SEO strategy.

The phrase “will blow your mind” is being used more and more. – Source: Ahrefs Content Explorer.

Whether in journalistic writing or web content, readers must be able to access the main information in just a few seconds. To achieve this, we use the 5W rule, commonly known in French as “QQOQCP.” Yes, that’s right—remember your middle school French classes! This technique helps answer the five questions readers will ask themselves before they start reading: “Who? What? Where? When? Why?” and sometimes “How?” as well.

To put this rule into practice, your content should follow a very specific hierarchical structure known as the inverted pyramid. This is the quintessential journalistic structure, perfectly suited for covering news online. The principle is simple: you start with the most important information and work your way down to the least important.

In an age when internet users have access to a vast amount of information—a phenomenon often referred to as “information overload”—it’s important to get straight to the point and keep in mind that readers won’t always have time to finish reading an article. In fact , what was the last article you read from start to finish?

How to Write SEO-Optimized and Compelling Headlines?

The title is what gives readers their first impression and determines whether or not they’ll continue reading. So be sure to craft your title carefully to make it impactful.

Ideally, the title should be between 50 and 70 characters long, which corresponds to the limit displayed in Google’s search results. It should be memorable and include a keyword so that it is optimized for SEO.

The title's too long—we were almost there!

When choosing your headlines, opt for the active voice and action verbs. This makes your content more dynamic by speaking directly to the reader.

If you write a blog, nominalization can also be used. This method is primarily used by journalists in the media, for slogans or book titles. Using a noun phrase is less dynamic but allows you to convey a lot of information in just a few words.

Optimize Your Tags to Make Your Content Easier to Read and Drive Clicks

Another key element to consider when writing for the web is HTML tags. They help structure page content, both for search engine crawlers and for readers, who will find it easier to navigate the pages. To make them effective, include relevant keywords in the tags. Some important tags to include in your articles are:

The title tag must contain keywords related to the article's topic.
The meta description tag should be about 150 characters long. That’s very short for summarizing a page’s content, so it’s best to take the time to write it carefully!
Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) are used to structure and organize your content hierarchically.
Bold and italic tags are used to visually highlight key information. The practice of making terms bold specifically for SEO purposes is completely outdated and can easily be mistaken for keyword stuffing.
Image tags allow you to describe the content of an image to Google in order to optimize your search engine rankings.

The more structured your website’s content is, the more effective your SEO will be. When entering text into your CMS, be sure to use these features properly. Simply increasing the font size does not turn a sentence into a heading. Managing a page’s style (CSS) and optimizing its semantics are two different matters. It works just like formatting in a word processor.

A well-written meta description tag can also help increase the CTR—that is, the click-through rate to your website.

Finally, be honest and avoid headlines that promise the moon just to get clicks. Clickbait is literally a “click trap,” as the name suggests. Sure, it drives traffic to your website, but disappointed visitors will have no reason to return, and this will harm your brand image. Furthermore, articles resulting from clickbait are often of poor quality and only partially address the topic promised in the headline. This practice should therefore be avoided if you want to produce high-quality content and optimize your SEO.

Social Media-Friendly Headlines

Be sure to vary your headlines depending on the platform, and don't forget that this content can also be shared on social media.

In 2010, Facebook released a protocol called Open Graph to optimize the sharing of external websites on the social network. This tool, now used by other social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn, has become essential in the world of web marketing. Open Graph allows for the use of tags in the text and thumbnail of a website to better manage content sharing with users.

It’s also possible to achieve strong SEO performance through effective title copywriting, even when competing against rivals that are better ranked, as this example shows.

Sentence Length and Clear Content

When writing for the web, opt for short, concise sentences that give your text a dynamic feel. Keep in mind that one sentence equals one idea. To avoid overwhelming the reader, break your text into several paragraphs to keep it well-spaced. Also, be sure to use simple language that everyone can understand and avoid overly technical terms.

Good readability is also a very important factor to consider in an SEO strategy. Content with good readability generally ranks higher and improves the user experience.

Readability relates to both typography and the level of understanding of the text. Sentence length and word length, in particular, are two key criteria. There are various methods for assessing whether your text meets readability criteria.

The Flesh test measures how easy a text is to read. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is to understand. On average, most standard texts score between 60 and 70.

The Flesh-Kincaid test assesses the readability of a text based on the U.S. grade level. For a standard text, the average score ranges from 7.0 to 8.0.

The Gunning Fog test is also designed to assess English language proficiency. Developed in 1952 by Robert Gunning, this test is primarily used in the field of management. It evaluates the number of words, complex words, and sentences in a text. The higher the index, the more difficult the text is to understand.

The Coleman-Liau test takes the number of characters into account by assigning scores ranging from 1 to 12. For a text that is easy to read, a score of 7 or 8 is recommended.

The Role of Personal Pronouns in Content Creation

That's it—your strategy is in place, and you've identified your personas. Now it's time to think about the tone of your editorial content.

You don’t address professionals in the same way as you address a young audience. The choice of pronouns (vous / tu) is therefore very important. The pronouns you use allow you to either establish a certain distance or create a more intimate atmosphere between you and the reader.

The question everyone is asking in 2021: Inclusivity or not?

Also known as gender-neutral language, inclusive writing is a hot topic—and one thing is certain: it leaves no one indifferent. Although no study has conclusively proven it, it appears that, for the time being, inclusivity is best avoided in the field of SEO. In fact, both the French government and the Académie française have rejected this style of writing.

It’s important to remember that your search ranking depends on the queries that internet users enter into search engines, and inclusive queries are still rare. Furthermore, search results using inclusive language do not always match those using traditional language.

The term “auteur•ice” yields very different results from “auteur,” which also demonstrates Google’s relevance in this case, as the results include content that intentionally uses inclusive language.

Nevertheless, we have noticed that an increasing number of media outlets are adopting inclusive writing, such as the online magazine Slate, which has opted for a more equitable style. Or the newspaper Libération, which likes to use gender-neutral language in its tweets but still prefers to stick to traditional writing in its articles for the sake of a better communication strategy.

If you're truly committed to using inclusive language in your web content, use it in the body of your articles but avoid it in your headlines, URLs, and meta descriptions to optimize your SEO results.

Olivier Andrieu answered the question in a video on the Abondance channel, stating, “If you write using inclusive language, there’s a fairly low chance of being found through standard search queries. It will also depend on the words and the type of inclusive language used. […] As long as search engines don’t process this kind of query, inclusive writing isn’t a good idea for SEO.”

Finally, let’s not forget that it is internet users themselves who determine how the French language is used online. Let’s keep a close eye on writing trends in search queries and see what the future holds!

Using Questions to Make Content More Engaging

One of the most effective ways to make an article more engaging is to use a question. A headline in the form of a question piques readers’ curiosity. If you start your article with a question, the reader will most likely want to find out the answer by reading the content. The goal of a question is to prompt the reader to click on your article. Finally, from an SEO perspective, keep in mind that internet users often tend to phrase their search queries as questions. “How?” and “Why?” are, for example, among the most popular title starters searched for by users. This will help you easily identify the right keyword.

What about rhetorical questions? In addition to sparking curiosity, this type of question helps convince the reader and get them thinking. It’s a great way to elicit a response and make them want to interact with you and read your content.

Web editors, copywriters, journalists: professions at the heart of content production

When it comes to content writing—whether for the web or traditional print media—there are several common techniques and best practices. The boundaries between professions are blurred, and there are often similarities across different fields of study. In fact, it’s hard to say exactly which profession influences another these days.

The role of a web editor, like that of a journalist or copywriter, involves researching information in order to produce original content. These professions require strong technical and linguistic skills, as well as a strong creative flair.

No matter what field you work in when it comes to content writing, a passion for writing and staying constantly up to date on developments in marketing and communications are essential.

Journalistic Writing for the Web