SEO For Blogs – Content Is King
One of the more frequent problems we encounter with our clients seeking help to achieve better web site results is simply “not enough content“.
When it comes to web site marketing, you’ve probably heard the over-used phrase “content is king“. It’s a fact! Just as a real estate broker hammers home the repetitive message “location, location, location”, for web site success, the message to repeat is easily “content, content, content”.
Need more content …
The typical syndrome that plagues too many web sites is thin content. Many small businesses believe that a brochure web site that puts up 5 to 7 pages including a brief “about us”, “our location”, and “our services” is enough to get the job done. If your only goal is to provide your street address and phone number to the occasional web site visitor, then perhaps those slim 5 pages will suffice.
But if your objective is to drive volumes of targeted traffic to your site, convert these visitors to new customers and increase your sales and profits, then you’re going to have to do a lot better than a handful of web site pages.
It’s all in the words …
With the advent of multi-media and Web 2.0, web site content takes on many forms including audio, video, images, and of course, text. These content varieties can provide a more interesting and engaging experience for your web site visitors. But the content I’m talking about that puts your web site on the proper “results” trajectory is the “words”.
Even with the rapid advances in technology on the Internet, the search engines still rely primarily on the words to figure out what your web site is about and whether you have the relevant content that will qualify for page one search results.
How much content is enough?
The answer is “you can never suffer from too much relevant content”. However, there are several content thresholds that are helpful to know about. Keep in mind, these thresholds are only approximate “rules of thumb”, and obviously your mileage will vary.
Two key concepts here. First, I’m not talking about slapping up just any sloppy, unrelated content on your web site just to bulk up your content volume. I’m talking about creating relevant, useful, thematically aligned content that provides interesting information of some value to your reader.
Second, while there are no hard and fast numbers, clearly more of the right kind of content tends to produce more traffic, and it tends to happen in quantum levels or plateaus (as in quantum physics).
- Initial launch – at your initial web site launch, 10 pages is the bare minimum to help you get indexed by the search engines. Sadly, how many small business web sites do you encounter that stop here.
- First milestone - a little search engine ranking magic happens somewhere around 50 pages. If you are putting together thematically focused and relevant content, you should start to see a small ramp in traffic volume at this threshold. Depending on your market, and how well you are optimizing your content around your keywords, you can reasonably achieve 300 to 500+ unique visits per day with only 50 pages of content.
- Critical mass - consider content critical mass at somewhere around 150 pages of content. Again, if you are doing your market and keyword research properly, and effectively optimizing your content around thematically related subjects and keywords, 150 pages of content can move you into the 3,000 to 5,000 unique visitors per day. Notice that the ramp is not just linear, but rather, a more geometric as the traffic curve begins to accelerate.
- A Force to contend with – at 3,000 pages of content, if you’ve pulled together a collection of thematically related pages, you will be regarded as a force to contend with, by both your human visitors as well as the search engines.
Now, most web sites will never reach or achieve something of this size and volume. But do you think that 3,000 pages is unachievable? Well, if you consider a blog post every day for 5 years, you will reach 1,500 pages and if you combine this with an eCommerce catalog of 1,000+ products (one detail page per product), you’ve almost got it covered. If you go about this the right way, you’ll could be driving volumes of traffic to your web site and significant profits to your business.
Is this a reasonable 5 year business goal? It is in my book! I hope it is in yours. And the good news is that you can achieve very respectable critical mass and site authority at far less than 3,000 pages.
How do you benefit from content?
Aside from the more obvious search engine ranking and trafic generation objectives, content brings many other positive benefits to your web site. Here are just a few of the important content leverages to consider:
- Authority – your customers do business with you because they trust you. They have confidence that you know what you’re talking about. That you’re good at the service or offering that you provide. It’s difficult to achieve this with just a few pages of content. And the more content you provide, the closer you are to achieve “authority site” status with the search engines.
- Interest – consider the benefit to your small business if you provide a reason for your customers to pay a return visit. You would certainly be pleased to see a familiar customer return often to your brick-and-mortar store. And the customer that’s familiar with your business is much more likely to buy from you again, right? Same holds true for your web site. The best way to insure those return customer visits online is to give them a reason to come back. Something new and interesting for them to experience at each return visit. And the more often they find something new and interesting at your web site, the more often they’ll come back for more. Unfortunately, the converse also holds true. Customers and prospects will be discouraged if they find “the same old information” hasn’t changed at all since the last time they paid you a visit. And this will actually drive your customers away.
- Connection – the content you provide through your web site helps you establish a connection with your customer. We all like to do business with people we know, trust and are familiar with. Through your content, you create this familiarity for your customer, and this human phenomena establishes that bond between your customer and your business (which is you). And more often than not, that translates into more repeat business from your loyal customers.
- Education – leverage the content on your web site to educate your customer about your products, service, industry, and business. It’s a basic human desire to “know more” and “learn”. Build loyal customers by helping them “become smarter” about your business, your products, your services. More important, you are educating your customer to find solutions to their problems. If your products or services require some customer training, your web site is the perfect vehicle to provide this kind of educational content. Your customers will appreciate you for this and reward you with business.
- Personal Touch – find your voice to create that personal touch. After all, when we find a business we admire, or simply someone we like to do business with, we naturally want to find out more about that person. The content you provide on your web site is the perfect vehicle to convey this personal touch. Think about that local neighborhood hardware store (hopefully you still have one nearby). If the store isn’t too busy, the store proprietor is usually delighted to chat with a friendly customer. Maybe it doesn’t directly have anything to do with the hardware business, but it’s just a little friendly communication. Make the connection, and throw a little personal touch into your web site content.
OK, that’s a little insight into the many benefits and leverages that good content will deliver for your small business. In a follow up post, we’ll explore some effective tools and strategies to create and manage the “all important” and “ever expanding” collection of content you need to create for your small business web site.
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now I’ll stay tuned..
any updates coming ?
@elensamma,
yes, please stay tuned. easiest way to automatically be notified with updates and new content is to subscribe to our RSS feed at blog4smallbusiness.com
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