What you write matters. When people don’t see what they want, they leave the site. Or worse, very poorly written websites are rarely found and often ignored.
What does good writing accomplish? Consider the methods prospective customers generally use to find your website: directly typing your web domain into the address bar, clicking on a link to your website or entering key terms into a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo etc.). This blog only examines the two latter methods, because I assume much of your target market doesn’t yet know your web address. How can we get people clicking on links to your site and landing on your website through online search?
Enter content strategy. It’s not enough to have a business website. Your website must be populated with words (i.e. copy) that compel the visitor to take action and ultimately purchase goods/services. I will cover three content strategies. Each strategy is appropriate for certain businesses. Basic and Moderate content strategies have the advantage of minimal time requirement. The “advanced” strategy clearly offers the most desirable long-term outcome, but demands the highest level of expertise to execute.
Basic Strategy – Novices commonly employ these two tactics in an effort to increase site traffic: building “low-quality” links and filling your web copy with keywords. Waste of time, but at least you can do it yourself for free. Maybe you enjoy the learning experience, but don’t expect this to produce consistent site visits.
Moderate Strategy – A respectable SEO company writes effective copy, builds quality links, researches keywords and enhances the content with optimal keywords. Obtaining quality links requires approaching publishers and communicating the value of the subject content to the publisher’s audience. Industry research allows selection of optimal keywords and contributes to technical SEO tactics not discussed in this post.
Advanced Strategy – In 2011, Google unveiled changes to their search algorithm that punish poor content and promote good content. Great content makes up a fraction of 1% of all content on the web. Yet, the majority of time people spend reading content on the internet is spent reading the GOOD STUFF. The reason small slivers of great content occupy most of the eyeballs, most of the time, is because people read the content, find it highly relevant and link to it spontaneously. Production of Advanced content generally requires: excellent grammar, strong business insight, creative writing skills and knowledge of marketing strategy and tactics.
The success of your online marketing effort depends on content. Poor content almost certainly results in substandard site traffic and low conversion rates. Contact Aristotle Development today to discuss implementing one of these three content strategies!
