A great looking website is no longer enough for your business to compete online. Increasingly, customers demand more from your company website than just a glorified brochure, designed to be nothing more than a lead funnel for the company, presenting limited information. This is often a frustrating experience for website visitors, increases bounce rates and reduces user engagement. Both negative factors for SEO.
People, particularly Generation Y, or Millennials, are taking to the web to find information about everything you can think of, and things you haven’t thought of yet! They are the generation who have grown up in the internet age and use the internet as a tool for socialising, information gathering, entertainment and shopping. Semantic and natural language search and the rise of voice controlled devices have also meant that the nature of online search is changing with more people searching for the answer to questions online. This is where your website content needs to be strong. Content Marketing on your website now means writing for user intent and answering questions.
If your website is static with very little content which gets updated you are going to lose ground in terms of search visibility. It is no longer possible to have a well optimised website if you don’t have good quality, unique content which aims to inform and engage website visitors and hopefully, provide the information they are looking for. There is no point in adopting SEO practices simply appeasing search engines, getting potential customers to your site is one thing, but keeping them there, and converting them into customers is another.
Creating good content is a skill which takes time and it is time which a lot of us are short of. It is not just a question of text – infographics and videos also make great content. For a lot of businesses who do not have a dedicated marketing department website content is too often a low priority against the more pressing aspects of running a business. They will also often lack the skills and resources to produce the variety of high quality content. This is where content creation services are beneficial.
In terms of search engine visibility, content creation is not a magic bullet and will not get you to the top of the search engine rankings overnight. Rather, the emphasis is on building quality information on your website by regularly adding content, proving your expertise and offering website visitors a positive experience and content which they will value. This will be reflected in the time visitors spend on your site, the bounce rate, the amount of pages they view. All these things are indicators of the quality of your site content which will, over time, improve your search engine ranking and visibility. For smaller businesses who are trying to compete with much larger businesses selling similar products, content creation offers the opportunity to optimise around related, longer tail keywords.
If you are interested in creating content for your website and don’t know where to start or recognise the importance of regular website updates but lack the time to do so regularly, get in touch with us for more information. From just a few hours per month we can research, produce and upload high quality content for your website, tailored to your business, your specific goals and, crucially, your budget. See our Digital Marketing and Content Creation pages for more information.