Content is simple, it is the text information available on your website for current and prospective customers to read. Quality content is more complicated. It involves providing interesting, relevant content that engages your website users. It also needs to be properly placed on the website and easy to navigate through, to enhance the usability of the content for the website users.
Placement: Where you place info on your website is important. The most important info needs to be “above the fold” (top half of the page) on the pages of your website. For example, announcing an important sale should be big, bold and “above the fold” on the homepage. If there is detailed info about it, link the announcement to the page that describes the sale specifics.
Ease of Navigation: If getting to the information is difficult, or not where most people would assume it should appear on your website, they will struggle to find it. They will simply go to someone else’s website. Keep navigation tabs simple and descriptive. Make sure the info on each page is on topic for that page. Don’t add additional pages that are not going to generate business. An example of this would include “Testimonial” pages. People won’t read a page of testimonials. Instead, spread them around the website and make sure that they are in context for that page.
Engagement: Quality content should be easy to read and understand. Remember that you are the expert, your customers are not. Photos are great for readers, but they need to be accompanied with a detailed description with emphasis on points that are important for your customer to notice. The info needs to be useful for the customer. Help them to feel comfortable contacting you by educating them first. This way they won’t feel foolish because they don’t understand the basics. Add a Tips/FAQs page that tells them the basics. This promotes multiple visits from interested prospects. Add a “call to action” to every page. Your goal is to entertain, inform and entice the customer.
Improved Search Engine Ranking: When you have provided quality content that engages your customers, Google takes notice. They cannot look at your content and assess quality, but they can look at customer engagement. How long your customers stay on your site, how many pages they visit, etc. The better your content, the better engaged your users will be, and hence the higher your search engine rankings will become.
Your organic search traffic will increase exponentially when quality content is paired with full, “white hat” SEO (search engine optimization) practices. Quality key word phrases included in the content and in the right density is vital. Quantity is important as well. This give the search engines more content to rank you for so when people search for your types of products and services, you are more likely to come up in the search results.
Originally posted on LinkedIn
Margaret is the marketing lead for Local MarketPlace. She has over 14 years experience in local business marketing, spanning website design, search engine optimization and much more. Certified on the SharpSpring platform, Margaret now focuses on integrating marketing automation into our clients businesses, both big and small.
