Writing for the web requires a real content strategy, also known as "content marketing", in order to define clear and precise objectives. Writing for the web is not exactly the same as writing for traditional journalism. While the web borrows techniques and mechanics from print writing and journalism, web copywriters have had to adapt them to these new media - screens - and the practices that flow from them. But what are the constraints faced by today's copywriter? What are the legacies of journalistic writing? And what do these two types of writing have in common?

What is engaging content?

Writing content is good. Writing relevant, engaging content is better. To this end, traditional journalistic writing has handed down a few good writing practices that are worth knowing.

First, let's look at what journalism has in common with web writing.

First step: attract the reader's attention.

Second step: provide him with information to entertain him or teach him something.

The objective remains the same, whatever the medium: offer quality content to build loyalty.

Good content writing practices include :

Knowing how to prioritize information. We'll come back to that a little later.
Know the law of proximity. In concrete terms, readers will feel more involved if the action takes place close to home. This proximity can be geographical, but also temporal, emotional, or dependent on the social environment.
Be precise and concise. Readers have no time to waste. They are constantly saturated with information and want to get straight to the point.
Know how to title. Before content can be read, it must be seen. The title has a real visual impact.
Remember to illustrate your message. Photos, drawings, graphics, the reader will more easily understand the message you want to get across with an illustration.
Master the art of storytelling. Quite simply, storytelling is the art of telling a story. This method of communication captivates the reader and generates emotions that will leave a lasting impression, creating a unique relationship between you and the reader.

To make your content engaging on the web, remember to publish regularly in order to stay present in the reader's mind, and create a kind of routine and regular rendezvous with them. Don't hesitate to diversify your articles, both in content and form. Create interactive content that makes readers feel involved and listened to.

SEO: why don't we just talk to robots?

When you're writing for the web, you have to meet the SEO requirements imposed by indexing robots, including GoogleBot, Google's famous robot. The trouble with Google is that its algorithms change all the time, so you need to be reactive and keep a constant watch.

There was a time when integrating a keyword into a page as many times as possible was enough to get you listed on Google's top queries. Nowadays, this method, also known as overoptimization or keyword stuffing, is penalized by search engines.

As the saying goes content is king "Google's robots can only determine the presence of keywords, not the relevance and added value of a piece of content. Only web users can determine the real value of a piece of content. Hence the importance of optimizing theuser experience.

Because the whole point of SEO is to please both robots and human beings. And to be understood by both! You need to put yourself in the head of an Internet user and understand what keywords interest them and what answers they want to find. The copywriting and choice of keywords must then be geared to this response. Mastering SEO means mastering words.

When it comes to SEO copywriting, putting yourself in the user's shoes is essential. It requires real empathy. Before even starting to write, the first step is to know who you're talking to. To do this, we need to establish our "personas", i.e. the profiles of our target audience, along with their interests, motivations, constraints and needs. Sometimes, however, it's also necessary to go out and meet potential customers, in order to better understand their expectations and meet them as precisely as possible.

All these constraints require compliance with both the technical criteria imposed by the robots and the psychological criteria that enable us to empathize with web users.

In short, writing for SEO is all about finding the right balance between robots and humans.

The importance of headings and text structure

The chapeau, or "chapô", summarizes the essential message of your text and whets the reader's appetite for more. It should inform the reader as well as entice them to stay and read the rest of the article. To achieve this, it needs to be short - a few simple sentences are enough - and contain the main keyword of the article's theme.

It's a good idea to be vigilant when you're writing your site, in terms of the choice of keywords and expressions likely to be used by Internet users when they search. Remember to vary your keywords. For this, don't hesitate to use keyword selection tools such as SemRush or YourTextGuru. Knowing how to analyze search trends is a highly effective part of any SEO strategy.

The expression "will blow your mind" is increasingly used. - Source: Ahrefs Content Explorer.

Whether in journalistic or web writing, the reader needs to have access to the main information in just a few seconds. To achieve this, we use the 5W rule, commonly known as "QQOQCP". Remember your French lessons in high school? This technique allows you to answer the 5 questions that the reader will ask before starting to read. Namely, "Who? Who? Where? When? Why?", and sometimes "How?

To put this rule into practice, your content should follow a precise hierarchical plan known as an inverted pyramid. This is the journalistic plan par excellence, perfectly adapted to the treatment of news on the web. The principle is simple: start with the most important information and work down to the least important.

In an age when Internet users have access to an immense amount of information (known as infobesity), it's important to get straight to the point, and to bear in mind that readers don't always have the time to read to the end . By the way, what was the last article you read in full?

How do you write SEO-optimized, high-impact headlines?

It's from the title that readers form their first impression and decide whether or not to read on. So be sure to write your headline with care to make it impactful.

Ideally, the title should be between 50 and 70 characters long, which is the limit Google displays in the results. It should be memorable and contain a keyword, so as to be optimized for SEO.

When choosing your headlines, use the active voice and action verbs. This energizes your content by directly addressing the reader.

If you run a blog, nominalization can also be used. This method is mostly used in the press by journalists, for slogans or book titles. Using a nominal group is less dynamic, but allows you to convey a lot of information in just a few words.

Make your tags easy to read and generate clicks

Another element to take into account when writing for the web is tags. They help structure page content, both for indexing robots and for readers, who will gain greater visibility on the pages. To make them effective, include relevant keywords in the tags. Important tags to include in your articles include :

The title tag must contain the keywords of the article's theme.
The meta description tag should contain around 150 characters. That's not a lot of space to present the content of a page, so it's best to write it carefully!
The heading tag (H1, H2, etc.) is used to structure and prioritize your content.
Bold and italic tags are used to highlight key information visually. The fashion for bolding terms specifically for SEO purposes is completely outdated, and the practice quickly becomes akin to keyword stuffing.
Image tags are used to describe the content of an image to Google in order to optimize your search engine optimization.

The more structured your website content, the more effective your SEO. When integrating your text into your CMS, make sure you use the right fonts. Enlarging the font doesn't turn a sentence into a headline. Managing page style (CSS) and semantic optimization are two different subjects. They work in the same way as formatting in word-processing software.

A well-written meta description tag also increases CTR, or the click-through rate to your website.

Finally, be honest and forget about headlines that sell dreams simply to get clicks. Clickbait is literally a "click trap", as the name suggests. It's true that it attracts traffic to your website, but it's also true that disappointed web users will have no reason to return, and that it's detrimental to your brand image. What's more, clickbait articles are often of poor quality and only partially address the promised title. This trend should be avoided if you want to produce quality content and SEO.

Social Media Friendly titles

Remember to vary your headlines according to the medium, and don't forget that this content can also be shared on social networks.

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 such as Twitter or LinkedIn, has become essential in the world of webmarketing. Open Graph enables the use of tags in the text and thumbnails of the website to better manage the sharing of content with Internet users.

It's also possible to achieve good SEO performance thanks to effective title copywriting, in the face of better-positioned competitors, as this example shows.

Long sentences and clear content

When it comes to web copywriting, short, concise sentences are the best way to add dynamism to your text. Keep in mind that one sentence equals one idea. To avoid frightening the reader, make several paragraphs to keep the text airy. Also remember 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. Texts with good readability generally rank higher and improve the user experience.

Legibility concerns both the typography and the comprehensibility of the text. In particular, sentence length and word length are two decisive criteria. To find out whether your text correctly meets the readability criteria, there are various evaluation methods available.

The Flesh test measures how easy a text is to understand. 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 evaluates the readability of a text according to the American school level. For a standard text, the average score is between 7.0 and 8.0.

The Gunning fog test is also designed to assess the English language. Developed in 1952 by Robert Gunning, this test is mainly used in the field of management. It evaluates the number of words, complex words and phrases in a text. The higher the index, the more difficult the comprehension.

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

The role of the personal pronoun in content production

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

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

The question on everyone's mind in 2021: inclusivity or not?

Also known as epicene language or neutral language, inclusive writing is the talk of the town, and one thing's for sure: it doesn't leave anyone indifferent. Although there are no serious studies to prove it, it seems that inclusivity is, for the time being, to be avoided in the field of SEO. Both the French government and the Académie Française have rejected this style of writing.

Don't forget that your positioning depends on the queries made by Internet users on search engines, and inclusive queries are still rare. What's more, the results of a search in inclusive script don't always give the same results as in classic script.

The term "auteur-ice" sends to very different results from "auteur", also showing a certain relevance of Google here as we find content voluntarily using inclusive writing.

Nevertheless, we've noticed that more and more media are using inclusive writing, such as the online magazine Slate, which has opted for more equitable writing. Or the newspaper Libération, which likes to use epicene writing in its tweets but still prefers to keep a classic script in the writing of its articles for a better communication strategy.

If you really want to use inclusive writing in your web content, prefer it in the body of your articles and avoid it in your titles, URLs and meta descriptions to optimize your SEO results.

Olivier Andrieu answered the question in a video for the Abondance channel, saying " If you write in inclusive script, there's very little chance of being found with classic queries. It also depends on the words and the type of inclusive writing used. [...] As long as search engines don't handle this kind of query, inclusive writing isn't a good idea in SEO. "

Finally, let's not forget that it's Internet users themselves who decide how the French language is used on the web. So let's keep an eye on our writing habits and see what the future holds!

The interrogative sentence to energize content

One of the most effective ways of energizing an article is to use the interrogative sentence. A title in the form of a question attracts readers' curiosity. If you start your article with a question, then the reader will most likely want to know the answer by reading the content. The aim of the interrogative sentence is to get the reader to react by clicking on your article. Finally, from an SEO point of view, remember that web users often tend to write their query in the form of a question. For example, "How?" and "Why?" are among the most popular headings used by Internet users. This will help you find the right keyword easily.

What about rhetorical questions? In addition to arousing curiosity, this kind of question helps to convince the surfer and make him think. It's a good way to get them to react and want to interact with you and read more.

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

When it comes to writing content, whether for the web or traditional prints, there are many techniques and best practices involved. The boundaries between professions are porous, and there are often similarities between each. In fact, it's hard to say which profession influences another these days.

Like journalists and copywriters, web copywriters have to research information in order to come up with original content. These professions require good technical linguistic skills and a strong taste for creativity.

Whatever the profession, when it comes to writing content, a passion for writing and constant monitoring of the marketing and communication fields are essential.

Journalistic writing applied to the web