Writing Effective Website Content: 7 Strategies for Impact

While research proves that the quality of your website’s design has an outsized influence on the credibility of your brand and how trusted it is, the primary reason why people visit your nonprofit online is to engage with your content. Every word on a website, from the body copy we read to the buttons we click, serves a purpose. Taking a strategic approach to content creation is critical to framing a narrative, building trust, increasing engagement, and generating action.?

Some website content positions your brand, expresses your values, and communicates the value that you offer. What we call “strategic poetry,” the style of this content matters as much as the substance. Other content is purely informational, such as news, research reports, or staff bios. And some content doesn’t even show up on your website—it’s the metadata that populates search engine results and URL unfurls. In every case, how content is written has a direct impact on your nonprofit’s visibility and reach.?

Taken together, all of this website content plays a vital role in how your nonprofit’s brand shows up in the world and how willing people are to engage. Unfortunately, despite being essential to a website’s success, content is often undervalued and overlooked in the design process. Nearly every website redesign RFP we receive rightly prioritizes the need for great UX, visual design, and engineering—while surprisingly, improving content quality is lightly mentioned or not mentioned at all. The result of starting a website redesign with this mindset is that content development isn’t budgeted for, creating content isn’t integrated into the design strategy, and a website rarely reaches its full potential.?

In this Constructively Curated, we’ve collected a few resources that have helped our team make sure that the website content we create is highly effective—which we hope will help you make every word on your website count.?

1. Make Your Content Readable and Scannable?

There’s an overstated idea that “online audiences don’t read.” And while research by the NIH suggests that the internet is changing how our brains consume content, the reality is more nuanced. Your audience is far more likely to scroll through and scan a website rather than read it word for word, so structure matters. Short paragraphs, bullets, subheads, and legible font choices aid in readability across device types. Best practices that make content easier to consume create better brand experiences and increase the likelihood that people will return to read more. Ready to write for readability? Here are three places to start: Nielsen Norman Group’s classic research on web readability remains relevant, Siteimprove shares seven readability tests to evaluate content, and one of our favorites, Hemingway is a great writing tool to improve content clarity and concision.?

2. Write for Accessibility and Inclusivity?

The last decade has seen a huge increase in awareness of designing for digital accessibility. Readable, well-structured writing benefits all audiences, including those using assistive technologies like screen readers. According to a WebAIM study that looks at the homepages of the top 1,000,000 websites, they found an average of 56.8 accessibility errors per page. This has significant consequences for the usability (and discovery) of content. Writing for accessibility includes best practices such as writing descriptive links, writing alt text for visuals, and providing transcripts for multimedia content. The W3C has also created comprehensive guidelines for writing for web accessibility. Lastly, this article on Writer’s Room emphasizes how accessible writing is just good writing.

3. Improve User Experience With Clear UX Writing?

UX writing is one of the more under-appreciated elements of how brands engage audiences. Think about the last time you abandoned a task online out of frustration, like signing up for a free account to access an article. Was the form confusing? Did you receive a vague error message? Every microinteraction online includes a UX writing decision. Form fields, buttons, navigation labels, prompts, error messages—the more intentional this writing is, the more it can be aligned with how a brand expresses itself and the outcomes a website creates. In their book Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience, Andy Welfle and Michael Metts make clear how UX writing shapes the ways that people understand, experience, and engage with brands online. In this guide to content design, Lauren Pope shares specific content design tips for the social impact sector. And Sarah Winters’ book Content Design is a foundational text that covers UX writing and beyond.

4. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines (SEO)

Effective web content isn’t just well-written—it also needs to be discoverable. Writing for SEO means combining technical and content components to boost your site’s visibility. For a solid foundation, we recommend Semrush’s guide to technical SEO, which covers structured data, on-page optimization, crawl directives, and other factors influencing ranking. Content SEO involves content strategy, optimizing your copywriting for SEO, and performing keyword research. In our day-to-day work, we frequently reference Yoast SEO’s resources for practical guidance.

5. Prepare for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

How can your nonprofit appear in ChatGPT summaries or Google Gemini snippets? As generative AI adoption and search results evolve, we’ll share best practices for optimizing content to appear in chat-based results. The good news is that (for now) many of the same SEO best practices still apply. Clear structure (headers, subheads, and bullets) enhance readability, while incorporating credible sources, statistics, and research boosts authority. To learn more about generative engine optimization, you can get started with HubSpot’s guide to GEO, read Search Engine Land’s generative optimization overview, or explore more on AI overviews from Backlinko.

6. Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice Across Your Site?

When you think about your nonprofit brand, you probably think of logos, colors, and fonts. But just as crucial is the language you use and how your brand shows up across digital channels, including your website. Your nonprofit’s brand voice is a powerful tool for building trust and emotional connection. A strong brand voice is consistent, recognizable, and helps your audience connect with your mission at every interaction. This consistency is especially important if your organization has microsites or local chapter pages. Unifying your messaging across touchpoints ensures your audience has the same experience with your brand, no matter where they discover you. In this post, Funraise offers tips for finding your nonprofit brand voice.?

7. Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Content?

Writing effective website content isn’t a one-and-done process. As your nonprofit (or the landscape) evolves, so should your content strategy. Regularly reviewing analytics, conducting user testing, and optimizing copy based on performance ensures your content remains relevant and impactful. At Constructive, we use Crazy Egg to track our client’s website data to improve content, design, and overall UX. A few other handy resources include Smashing Magazine’s guide to testing and measuring content in UX and Looppanel’s guide to effective content testing.

Closing Thoughts

There’s a lot to consider when writing website content to ensure that it’s appropriate and effective for your nonprofit brand—balancing readability, SEO, UX, and brand voice is no small task. These resources provide steps you can take to improve your website content writing and strengthen your audience’s experience with your brand in the process. And if you’re ready to prioritize content in your website redesign, we hope you’ll get in touch. We’d love to discuss how we can help!