In website design and website marketing, there has only been one constant – content. But why has it lasted the test of time? What makes content an integral part of raising awareness for a brand or blog? In this post, we’ll outline why website content is so important. Also, we’ll touch on how Google discovers good content, and how you can get on search engines’ radars, and how to create great content.
Continue reading if you want to learn more about content marketing from an award-winning online marketing specialist.
Why is Website Content so Important?
Several other mediums exist, and some of them are advertised as the best thing since sliced bread. However, content is still the king of blogs and websites alike. Here are some of the reasons why content marketing should always be an essential part of your business plan.
It Keeps People Coming Back
You need to offer a service that makes customers come back for more, but you aren’t an eCommerce site. Not to worry because your content is as compelling as any product or item. High-quality content that is well-crafted makes people relate through emotions, humor, or sheer logic. As soon as this happens, you will hook your audience and they’ll want to come back again and again to read more excellent posts. Considering users spend less than six seconds before judging a site’s written content, it’s imperative to give them a reason to return.
Content Utilizes SEO
Search engine optimization is what Google and other search engines use to flag your content. It’s a useful tool because it’s free and easy to implement if you understand the basics of SEO. The hard part is finding natural ways to include it within your site, but your content has your back. By researching relevant keywords, for example, you can rank highly on result pages and boost the level of traffic that views your site. Alternatively, backlinks from a reputable company or platform will enhance your reputation and transform you into a market leader. Although people see SEO as the chief protagonist, it wouldn’t be possible without well-written, organized, organic content.
Remember: no matter how much onsite SEO you apply to your website, it will ultimately fail if the content is of low-quality.
It’s Adaptable
Unlike content marketing, web design trends come and go and how we access it changes all of the time. Currently, mobile-friendly websites are fashionable and for good reasons. Consumers spend 90% of their time in mobile apps, while the mobile internet has grown over 500% in media consumption since 2011. You want a piece of the action, which is where content comes into play because you can make it mobile-friendly. How? It’s by chunking paragraphs into small sections so that they’re easier to read, or using snappy sentences. Short headlines also are effective, too, as is responsive content that fits around a small screen without any effort.
Content is Engaging
Don’t view content as words on a page or screen. In the 21st-century, it is much more – it’s engaging. Today, the new king of content is video because it’s interacting and makes audiences sit and listen. As a result, they understand the message better and are more likely to make a conversion. Plus, interactive features make shareable content easier to implement on social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. If you create high-quality content, whether it’s text, image or video, that resonates with audiences, there’s a chance it can go viral. Once this happens, traffic, leads, conversions, and sales will skyrocket.
Good content is what sets your website apart from the masses.
How Does Google Discover Good Content?
Google is the leader in content marketing, so you must tailor your content to their algorithm. With that in mind, you need to know three things:
Crawling: Google Bots crawl web pages to figure out what pages already exist on the web. A tip: sites that duplicate content won’t rank highly as the crawling process will find them and dock them points.
Indexing: Once it’s discovered, Google will attempt to work out what it means and how it adds value. It does this by analyzing the page elements – content; videos; images – and stores the info on a database.
Serving (Ranking): Finally, Google serves the information to a user when they input their keywords into the search engine. Serving is also known as ranking because the most relevant answers are provided, and if that’s your website, then you get ranked accordingly.
Does Google Know What High-Quality Content Is?
Not straight away, but it does set the parameters. For example, if you don’t offer a web page that is relevant to Google users, the content won’t rank highly. As a result, the standard is poor and needs reworking.
It discovers the best content by linking the main elements to its guidelines. Content that fits the brief is picked up by its algorithm and stored. Ways to enhance your SERPs ranking, and therefore your content, include:
- Getting other sites that Google knows about to link to your platform
- Use page headings, short, meaningful titles, and text rather than images and videos
- Keep it up to date for value-adding purposes
- Make it mobile-friendly and quick to load
These are the reasons that old-fashioned sites still rank highly on Google to this day. Although they aren’t SEO-optimized, mobile ready or anything like aesthetically pleasing, but they are up to date & loaded with original, good quality content.
Do Web Design & SEO Mean Anything?
Yes, as both are still crucial elements of content marketing. From an SEO perspective, keywords and phrases that match with those of users make Google’s job twice as easy. Optimization is about understanding people and what they are searching for online and then adding value. If you can learn more about your audience’s intent, you can deliver it in a way that Google bots will crawl and index it for later. It’s for these reasons that organic SEO is superior and boosts traffic by as much as twenty times more than PPC.
Web design also helps Google’s algorithm crawl for the best content on the web, but it does it differently. H1 and H2 tags, images and mobile-friendly features all help due to their impact on the user experience. The same goes for prioritizing your most important features high up, whether it’s content or aesthetics. Google wants to add value, and web design does when it encourages users to spend more time on a site and share content with their followers.
Of course, none of this is applicable when the standard of content is poor. Only engaging and well-written posts that are responsive are crawled, indexed and served by Google. After all, it directly impacts SEO and web design.
How to Create Great Content for a Website
The last step is to create fantastic content that Google can read and rank appropriately. With lots of options at your disposal, it can be tough to pick the techniques that are ideally suited to your site. The good news is that we have listed a selection of the most useful strategies underneath.
Invert Your Message
Usually, the body of the text will include the main points. However, engaging content for blogs and websites means that you have to grab a reader’s attention right away. Remember that they spend around 0.05 of a second before they form an opinion of your sites’ design AND its contents. Therefore, you need to flip the structure so that the most important topics are in their face and easy to spot. That way, you’re allowing your content to make a quality first impression.
Write Short, Simple Sentences
Long sentences don’t work because your audience’s attention span is low. Plus, reams of text is difficult to read on a computer screen. And, let’s not forget about writing scalable, responsive content for various online platforms. With that in mind, try and write sentences that are fewer than forty words. Alternatively, you can use subheadings and bullet points to make the text scannable.
Show Them
Excellent content helps readers to understand your message better by creating visual messages. Links, then, are essential as they transform your content from generalities into real-time examples. Plus, there is a bonus: links are fantastic SEO boosters as they add to the crawling and indexing processes. A great option is to highlight and hyperlink your keywords as they are the buzzwords they want to know more about.
Know Your Audience
It’s impossible to create engaging and interactive content without first understanding your audience. Firstly, it ensures you know who you are targeting and why. Putting pen to paper, or fingers to a keyboard, before thinking about how to reach your users won’t optimize your results. Secondly, it means that you research keywords and phrases and analyze which platforms are best for interacting.
Summary
SEO and web design elements need to be applied to your website if it’s going to be successful. Without a good-looking, professionally optimized site, everything from traffic to leads and sales will drop. However, content is still the most important aspect of marketing as it provides a base for everything else.
To make sure you don’t neglect it, you should contact us now to find out how we can help with your content marketing strategy.
