Science Writing: Tips and Tricks to Boost your Science Content

18th October 2023 - 0 comments

Content marketing is a fantastic opportunity to engage and inform your target audience, build brand awareness and encourage customer action. The science industry is especially well-suited to content marketing – science communications can be an effective way of conveying often complex concepts in an accessible manner. At the core of scientific content marketing is science writing, the creation of scientific content that aims to attract and engage your scientific customer base by providing them with relevant and useful information.

Science writing goes far beyond simply promoting products or services; the core focus lies with educating and empowering readers. Sharing valuable information through science communications is a great way to establish your businesses as a thought leader, while helping your target audience make informed decisions. Scientists love useful information, so whether it’s explaining the science behind a product, commenting on industry trends, or discussing ways to improve procedures and processes, science content can help you to establish credibility and foster meaningful connections with your customer base.

The content itself can take many forms, from infographics to blogs, case-studies, whitepapers, even podcasts and social media posts. If you’re writing for a commercial company, then it’s important to keep in mind that your target audience does not have to read what you write (you’re not publishing in a highly-ranked scientific journal). So to keep them interested, your content needs to be easy-to-read and engaging. Science writing is an artform, but there are a number of simple tactics that can be deployed to get the best from your content. In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits of science writing and provide tips and tricks to help you captivate and educate your audience through science communications.

Writing with purpose

Science communications serve many purposes, and it’s good to have clear goals in mind before putting pen to paper. As mentioned, useful science content can be a great way to connect with your customer base and build trust, but beyond this there are a number of other benefits:

• Improving website search engine rankings (SEO)

• Encouraging readers to consider products and services

• Establishing thought leadership

• Driving profitable customer action

Creating SEO content

Search engines like Google prioritise websites that publish valuable, relevant and consistent content in their search rankings. To get noticed by search engines, your content needs to be optimised for the search engines (SEO). By creating SEO content, you can boost its search engine ranking, making it easier for targeted potential customers to find your business online.

Publishing regular SEO content on your website will improve the number of visitors and potential leads organically, and without the costs of search advertising. In order to get the most SEO value from your science writing, there are a number of strategies that you can implement that search engine algorithms are known to favour:

1. Keyword research– select a primary keyword for your article. Using online keyword research tools, you can better understand your target market and how they are searching for your content, products or services.

2. Keyword use – Include your primary keyword in your title, and incorporate into headings and use (very) approximately one in every 400 words of copy. It’s important to let keywords flow naturally and in a contextual way though – too much repetition, known as ‘keyword stuffing’, may negatively affect SEO rankings.

3. Search engine friendly content – It’s important to format your content with HTML tags, keep your page title and meta description within search engine character/pixel limits, with keywords included and maintain a concise and clear writing style throughout.

4. Links – Search engines prioritise pages with internal and external links, consider 2-3 relevant pages on your website that each piece of content could link out to.

Writing quality original content

If you want potential customers to keep coming back to your site, it’s important to have quality content that’s unique, useful and posted regularly. In the science industry, this content can require a level of background knowledge and expertise to be able to convey the relevant information in a clear manner. A good starting point then, is to turn to scientists to write your science content. It may seem obvious, but scientists have hands-on experience in the field, and will be able to draw from this experience and background knowledge to create quality, concise content tailored to your target market.

With the emergence of AI copywriting software – some might see this as an easy ‘quick-fix’ option for their science content creation, but beware! Chatbot tools are renowned for producing bland, repetitive content that’s by no means guaranteed to be factual. It can be an SEO disaster too – search engines can detect AI content, and don’t like dull copy or repetition, so stay clear of using AI content verbatim if you want your content to succeed (at least for now!).

Encouraging customer action

You’ve got your audience’s attention, but now you want to encourage customer action. This is one of the more subtle arts of science writing. While it may be tempting to push the hard sell, going over the top with the promotional aspect is a sure-fire way to send your potential customers running. As such, taking a more educational/informative tone can often garner better results. Case studies and customer testimonials, for example are a great way of highlighting your product or service in a more indirect fashion.

But how can we prompt readers to act further? One of the best devices to achieve this are ‘calls to action’ (CTAs). These are small phrases directed at the reader – such as ‘Want to find out how to do X faster? Contact us today”. CTAs can be implemented into your copy, and will usually be accompanied by a link out to other internal pages such as product pages, other articles and useful content and contact information pages.

Written for scientists, by scientists

We have seen the numerous benefits that producing high quality communications can bring to science businesses, and covered some inside tips and tricks for getting the most out of your content. When it comes to science writing though, you should never underestimate the value of scientists for writing high-level, rich content. However, good, knowledgeable scientists do not necessarily make good communicators or writers. So it’s important that your writers both understand the science and can write clearly and compellingly.

At Alto, we are experts in life science content marketing, with over 20 years’ experience in the industry and a PhD-level technical writing team that understands complex scientific topics, are great writers, and have expertise in SEO. So, if you want to enrich your content output and boost your organic search engine rankings – contact us today.