Good content is important for driving traffic to your website and converting a passive audience into paying customers.
Whatever business you are in you’ll have competitors. When people search for what you’re selling online they’ll go through a stage of researching what’s out there to find the best quality service or product they can find. Good content is important so that when someone searches for a business like yours, not only can you be discovered in the first page of Google, but people actually want to choose you over the next one on the list.
Search engines love words
Imagine for a moment that you need to find a web designer in your local area and you decide to start searching for someone online. You put your search term into Google, for instance ‘Web design Liverpool’, and start reading through the results. If you’re searching on a desktop computer you’ll see at the top it says something like ‘About 4,400, 000 results’. That’s a lot of results, which are all ranked in order of how relevant they are to your search term. It’s unlikely you’ll choose anything past the first 10 results, 20 at a push, but how did those you’re seeing get to the top?
I won’t go into the nitty gritty of search engine optimisation (SEO) but it’s important to know that good content is the backbone of good SEO. Search engines such as Google are crawling millions of websites constantly in order to provide the most useful and relevant results for their search engine. Without a decent amount of content about your key services, sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo will never display your site if there’s no way to tell what it’s about.
What about other website traffic?
You’re right, search engines aren’t the only way to direct people to your website. Someone could easily look you up after seeing your business card or your van graphics, or even be referred to you by a friend or family member. Let’s put ourselves in their position instead.
So again let’s say you’re looking for a web designer. This time you start chatting to people about it and gather a few business cards . When you eventually sit down to check the websites of potential designers you find that some portfolio sites are full of case studies, along with useful service descriptions and a bit about who these people are and what they do. Others are basically just a holding page with hardly any content, maybe one or two images and a couple of social media links.
Do you think you’ll choose the people who can demonstrate they make great websites and tell you what they can do for you, or is a nice photo and a couple of links enough to give you confidence in a company?
Confidence in words
So hopefully by now you’re starting to see how important it is to have good quality, engaging or informative content which really shows you off to the world, while hopefully getting you plenty of hits from search engines.
If you know your business inside and out but you’re not confident in your writing skills, I can help connect you with people who write excellent content. While I can string a sentence or two together in a colourful manner, I know a few freelance copywriters who are much better at writing excellent copy, with just enough keywords to make search engines take notice.
Feel free to contact me and I’ll be happy to put you in touch with someone who can help.