Why Tone & Voice Are Important When Writing Helpful Content

Preparing content for long-term success requires a fundamental understanding of where things started and where they are going. For example, overloading your content with terms you wanted to rank for became a black hat SEO practice with the Panda update in 2011. Then, the intent of content first took center stage after the Hummingbird update in 2013. Now, with the latest round of Google Core and Spam updates, we see brand voice and helpfulness of content at the forefront.

Know the Difference Between Brand Tone vs. Voice

Owning a consistent brand tone and voice builds trust with our audience and also builds familiarity with our buyers. Through our writing, our buyers get to know who we are. We want to remember that we’re building a relationship with our buyers through the content on our web pages.

Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, brand tone and voice are quite different:

• Brand Voice
  • The personality, values, and characteristics that define what makes our brand unique and reflects our brand’s ethos.

• Brand Tone
  • Specific attitude or emotional inflection conveyed in writing and may vary depending on the context or purpose of our message.

Conversational Writing Builds Relationships

Talk with your audience, not at them. Imagine you’re at a lunch meeting, having a conversation. Would you use a bunch of fancy terms, speaking formally and like you’re on autopilot? Or would you use terms you know the person you’re with understands—more casual and personable?

If your buyers are with the 40+ year old business crowd, you may not want to use ‘rizz is on fleek.’ Instead, go for something like ‘a very attractive offer.’ It’s all about hitting the right note with your specific crowd.

And don’t forget to tackle the questions that matter to your target audience. If you’re in the food and beverage industry, stay with industry-specific topics like up-and-coming automation tools, not what the most purchased plungers in restaurants are.

Use Appropriate Language for The Reader

The language you use will vary depending on the demographics you’re targeting, but how you engage your buyers and employ your brand voice and tone will set the precedence for how your conversations are expected to go beyond the content on your website.

We have 10 to 20 seconds to make a connection before the buyer leaves our website to go to another. Think of websites as our storefronts and the content as our showroom. How we present it will determine whether our buyers invest in what we are selling or choose a competitor.

Write how you engage in person and follow these tips:

• Engage the reader in the conversation by using terms that include them like ‘we’ or ‘our’ when possible.
• Keep it honest and straightforward. You have a limited amount of time before you lose the buyer’s focus; don’t waste it.
• Keep the language at an appropriate reading level. If industry-specific terms or abbreviations are used, clarify them so that all readers understand the content and no one feels left out. Negative feelings are never good, especially when we might be the ones creating them.

If our audience finds our content helpful and we follow search algorithm best practices, then the content will rank—even when faced with algorithm updates. The most important person to search algorithms like Google will always be the user.