Week5: Best SEO Content Strategies
Last week we took an in depth look at the power of Internal Linking and how to use it on your site. This week we show you the importance of quality SEO content and how important it is for converting visitors into customers.
Here’s what you will learn:
✓ The Golden Rules of Content
✓ The Benefits of a Regularly Updated Website
Content is vitally important to your search engine rankings for numerous reasons. The search engines want to find unique and relevant content for their users and your visitors want content that is well written and useful to them. The more your websites content achieves these things the better chance you have of success.
Three Golden Rules to Creating Content
- It must be unique
- It must be written for your audience
- It must be high quality
Your Content Has to be Unique
This is the most important rule when it comes to creating content. If only it was as easy as copying content from a similar site and pasting it onto your own. The problem with this is a thing called duplicate content. This is content that appears on the Internet across more than one webpage. The problem with duplicate is search engines find it difficult to decide which version is more relevant to a certain search query.
In order to provide a relevant and user friendly experience the search engines won’t show multiple pages of the same content. This forces them to choose which version is most likely the original, preventing the others from being shown in the search results.
It Must Be Written With Your Audience In Mind
Understanding your visitors needs and wants isn’t rocket science but it is crucial the success of your content. If you have taken the time to really understand your market, your individual customers needs and executed your keyword research thoroughly then you should already be well on your way.
For example if you have a lawyers site and have found people searching for “employment lawyer” and “divorce lawyer” and choose those keywords to target you already know what your visitors situation is and their desire. Similarly if you operate a local home renovations company and you target the keywords “Auckland home renovations” you know the people searching for that are interested in finding a home renovations company in the Auckland area.
In both cases you know exactly what your visitors want and can construct content that converts their desire into an action. Remember since you aren’t speaking to them face to face your content needs to address any objections or questions they may have before they ask them. This will keep them on the site longer, help to build trust and make it much more likely to choose your business as the solution to their problem.
It Must Be High Quality Content
So you have a good amount of unique content on your site and its ranking well in the search engines. But wait there’s a problem, the content is is poorly written, the grammar stinks and it’s just not very compelling. Now this might be stating the obvious but nothing says unprofessional and incompetent like a piece of content that isn’t readable. Read and re-read, then get someone else to proof the content. It could be the difference between converting that visitor into a customer or not (Feel free to point out our spelling mistakes and grammatical errors)
Now all you need to do is ensure the content is compelling enough that it will make your visitors want to take the desired action. Since its not like speaking to them face to face the most important thing is to keep everything succinct, relevant and engaging. Break long copy up with subheadings or turn it into more than one page, use bullet points and images.
Another benefit from having high quality content is that it is more likely to be linked to naturally. This will mean more exposure and traffic to your site.
The Benefits of Fresh Content
Another great idea to maintain your sites relevancy and build its authority is to continually update it with fresh content. A simple way to achieve this is by adding a blog or news section to your site. This way you can continue to add unique and high quality content that will keep people coming back. Also having more pages increases the amount of keywords your site can potentially rank for which is great for traffic and search engines like sites that are regularly updated, crawling them more often.
Remember to create unique, high quality content with your visitors in mind. It needs to be easy to digest, compelling, answer any questions they might have and provide a solution to their problem. Get all this right and you will have higher conversions, lower bounce rates and ultimately more traffic to your site.
In the sixth part of the SEO Mini Course we’ll be delving into the holy grail of search engine optimisation, that is link building or Off Page Optimisation. You won’t want to miss this one.
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See you at the top!
The Team at A+ online reputation SEO expert.
Got Questions?
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