When it comes to web design more often clients are looking for modern, sleek, and simple websites to capture the eye. A comment most web development agencies hear regularly is to reduce the content and make the pages more image-led. While we all love a sharp website with great images, content should not be forgotten in this formula for creating a website. Put simply, removing content could be harmful to your search engine ranking.
Website content is a key player in creating, building, and targeting the audiences relevant to your business. Search engine crawlers will use the content on each website page to understand what your website is about. However, do not forget that content is not just for crawlers, it is also for your website visitors to help them understand what your website is about, what services or products you offer, and how you can help them achieve what they are looking for.
Content is important to both search engine crawlers, and for helping convert website visitors into your customers.
Here are our top 5 reasons for optimizing your website content for search and conversions.
- Use Relevant & Quality Content
Quality and relevant content is massively important for search engine rankings. If, for example, a customer searches for dentists near me, they do not want to land on a website for dental equipment. When writing website content, you should consider that the content you are using is not falsifying what your company offers. As a company, you only want to get relevant website visitors to increase conversions via your website.
- Audience Education
If a user has typed a search query into Google, Bing, or another search engine they are generally looking for an answer to their query. This answer may come in the form of a product or service you offer, information from a blog you have posted, or your company’s general ‘about’ pages on your website. You should always put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think ‘If I were looking for my service what would I search for?’. Ensuring each of your pages have all the relevant content a potential customer would be looking for is key to helping educate your audience.
- Avoid Duplicate Content
When a website visitor is on your site you want to try and avoid showing them large blocks of duplicate content on various pages throughout the website. This could appear as if you have nothing valuable to say and are just building out the content where you can to make it ‘look better’. Duplicate content is a massive no-go for search rankings as it can appear like you are trying to manipulate your rankings and increase your traffic. If you wanted to highlight a relevant product, service, or blog consider an internal link to the specific page rather than duplicating it.
- Enhances SEO
In the digital age if anyone has a question or query, they will often type their query into a search engine like Google and in an instant have multiple answers. Writing great content throughout your website will help optimise your website content to appear in relevant searches and attract potential new leads to your website. It is important to remember content is only one part of optimising your SEO. Without content, you cannot target specific keywords, help educate your audience or link to valuable content on your social platforms.
- Include Call to Actions on Every Page
Calls to Actions should complement your content. Your website strategy will usually have two fundamental goals:
- Increase leads, and
- Increase Sales.
Using relevant calls to actions to complement your content will help to complete the user journey. Examples of calls to actions include contact us, enquire now, buy now, request a quote, add to cart, leave a review, download specification, or anything else relevant that your website users may want to do. Calls to action can help to increase conversions and have the bonus of being able to be tracked via Google Analytics Goal Tracking.
Without great website content, your website has no meaningful, quality, or relevant purpose. Your website audience will not get answers to their top-level questions, and they could click off to a competitor site that provides them with answers and quality information. Content should be seen as the foundation of your website and digital marketing strategy to help attract and target your audience, and convert them into customers.
