Is On-Site Content Important? In a Word, Yes.

Put your hand up if you are constantly bombarded with the words, ‘content’ or ‘content marketing’, and let’s throw ‘SEO’ into the mix too. Chances are, you have both hands up, and if you are really supple, you may be resting on your tailbone with all four limbs in the air.

Despite this jovial introduction, your onsite content really does play such an important part in your search engine rankings, and that’s why you should take great care and consideration when writing it. When it comes to the Google ranking factors, ‘content’ appears consistently.

Not only is content usefulness and relevancy important, but so is supplementary content. By this we mean any other related queries your audience may have about your business offering or industry. Grammar and spelling, uniqueness and originality is also listed as a ranking factor, so in short – you cannot just repeat the same content on every single page on your website, and the content that you DO produce needs to be lengthy, in-depth and bring VALUE to the reader, as well as being grammatically correct.

There is much speculation in the SEO industry with regards to the impact that bounce rate (users coming onto a page before leaving pretty sharpish) has; but one sure fire way to reduce this bounce rate is to publish unique content that is going to engage your audience and encourage them to read the entire piece before moving on and reading other articles or looking at other pages.

Let’s think about this for a second; if users are enthralled by your content, they look at more pages, they stay on site longer, the bounce rate decreases; these all signify to Google that ‘this site is giving users what they need, it must be useful and valuable’; and your rankings begin to improve. This is determined as ‘behavioural analysis’, and is one of the two human factors that can affect how your content; the other is Quality Raters, where your work is manually checked my people that rate is against quality guidelines.

Your onsite content should also be refreshed and updated consistently, as Google caffeine (an indexing infrastructure) favours content that has been published or updated recently – particularly with regards to time sensitive searches. When it comes to updating your website content, small superficial changes aren’t enough, and you won’t win points for editing a typo or changing the structure of a sentence. Adding new paragraphs of recent information is the way you want to go – or completely removing outdated points completely.

What Is Content?

So, what are we referring to when we use the word ‘content’? Content of course, can mean different things to different people, but here is our take.

Content is useful, valuable, and high-quality information that is produced with the intention of enlightening, entertaining or engaging an audience or encouraging them to undertake an action that can be tracked and analysed. It can be produced in a wide range of forms from written articles and interviews, illustrated items such as infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content such as surveys and quizzes.

Ultimately your brands content can shape and define how you are perceived by your audience, customers and prospects. In this article we are talking specifically about onsite content, and by this we mean the content across the whole of your website. This could be anything from your homepage, landing pages, contact page – everything on your site, including blogs.

If you were to analyse your website content now, could you honestly say that you took great care and consideration when putting it together? Did you write it to enlighten your audience and proactively answer any questions or elevate concerns about your business? Is your content rich, and at the very least grammatically correct.

As mentioned in the first part of this post, there should not be content duplicated across any of your pages. Yes, that’s right – ALL of your content should be unique. Even if there are many strands of your business that are closely related, you should take the time and care to ensure that each page has its own dedicated, informative and useful content. Time consuming? Yes, but totally worth it.

Does Content Mean ‘SEO’?

While content and SEO aren’t one and the same, they do have a symbiotic relationship and your content plays a crucial and starring role when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Googles algorithms are constantly developing and progressing in order to remain true to the company’s original mission statement, ‘to organise the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Google delivers this information in the form of content available, and the content is ranked according to how useful, informative and valuable it is, and how relevant it is to the user’s search.

So, in short, each piece of content that you create needs to benefit the user to have ‘SEO value’. Google have clear best practice guidelines that specify what you should aim to achieve with your content, and what you should avoid:

Google Content & SEO Guidelines

If you are striving to hit each of these guidelines, then you are maximising the potential value of your content and site when it comes to SEO.

For a while, SEO agencies and some uninformed marketing agencies would ‘spin’ content (aka BAD SEO), a lazy strategy that rarely provided benefit to the users. As a result, websites would be littered with articles of 300-600 words, stuffed with keywords that provided surface-level information at best. While there are still some firms that operate in this way, unless they are incredibly well written and packed with relevant information, which many aren’t, they just don’t provide any ROI. This article discusses the practice of content spinning and provides further information on why it should be avoided entirely.

Let’s be honest here, there is far more to the SEO potential of a website than its content; there is a world of technical aspects that also need to be implemented, and we will discuss that in another blog.

Of course, using keywords, especially long tail keywords, is going to guide you in producing content, but keywords aren’t a factor of quality, so don’t focus on them. What will really help you is taking an audience-centric approach. Which brings us to our next point.

How Do I Create Content?

As we just touched upon, in order to create content that is compelling and will be well-received by your audience, you have to put yourself in their, metaphorical, shoes.

I want to specify again, that for the purpose of this post, we are only talking about onsite content. If we were talking about offsite or content for the purpose of gaining PR placements, we might take a slightly different tact.

For your web pages, you need to strike a balance that describes, in depth, who you are, where you came from, what your business offering is and what sets you apart from your competition. All this needs to be done in a way that is aligned with your brand, in a tone and using the language that resonates with your audience.

Use your blog (if you are considering dismissing a blog altogether, please refer to Why Your Terrible Business Blog Isn’t Worth The Effort) to provide further context and information to the user.

You can identify topics that should be covered in your blogs by performing keyword research, using proven tools, but remember to avoid highly competitive keywords and do NOT stuff your content with this keyword in a way that would be viewed as spam.

You can also use tools such as Google Trends, Buzzsumo, and forums, or by monitoring your competitors content, looks for content that has been shared many times or attracts engagement such as comments. You could go as far as to ask your customers and audience what they would like to know about the industry, run a Google survey, or begin with a list of the most commonly asked heard questions, biggest misconceptions or any trending industry topics.

Screen shot of Google Trends for ‘content marketing’ in UK over past 12 months.

By determining your audience, you can begin to gain an understanding of the format that will be best received. For example, if your audience is comprised of other business owners, you know that their time is precious, and they need easily digestible, cut-to-the-chase style content, and therefore, video content may be best option, with an accompanying written article.

Of course, by regularly analysing your best performing content, you will know what your audience is engaging with, and the type of content you should focus on creating. If you ever reach a creative block, refer back to our word cloud image for inspiration and ideas.

I Created Content, Now What Do I Do?

You make it the absolute best it can possibly be, also known as ‘optimisation’.

First and foremost, your content should be formatted in a way that makes it easy to digest. This is important for 2 key reasons; the first is that online readers are known to have short attention spans, and the second is that over 60% of traffic comes from mobile – have you ever read a super long paragraph on a smart phone screen?

Keep paragraphs short, and use subheadings, images or embedded videos to break up the content and keep their attention.

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR HEADLINES. They need to be punchy and attention grabbing, enticing the reader to want to know more.

Another way to optimise your content is to include links to trusted and authoritative sites, because it boosts the credibility of your content, and ultimately, your website. However, be vigilant when it comes to the text you use when linking out, this is known as ‘anchor text’; make sure the words you use are relevant to the content you are linking too and stick to 5 words or less when linking out.

It is also good SEO practice to include internal links, linking to other pages to support or point, or provide further, relevant information to the reader. By doing this, you are establishing a strong website structure, by aiding Google to navigate your site and determine which pages are more valuable, or authoritative to your audience.

A good rule to follow is in each blog you write, include one external and internal link for every 700 words – to relevant, valuable and rich content.

Another area that we need to touch upon is content 'amplification'.

This is the method of getting your content out in front of a wider audience; sure, great content will produce improved organic results, but what if we could drive MORE traffic to it, improving the behavioural aspect?

Your content can (and should) be pushed out using organic social media posts, but you should also consider testing paid ads, PPC, remarketing and email campaigns to get it in front of your audience, for further inspiration, you should read this post about strategies to amplify your content. The better the content, the more likely they are to stay on site, again improving the behaviour analysis element of the Google ranking factors.

Be sure that you optimise your images for each social platform and analyse the performance of the organic posts and ads to ensure you are maximising your contents amplification potential.

To conclude…Why is onsite content so important?

Because well written, valuable, informative and entertaining content that has been written for your audience will improve your visibility and search engine rankings.

Each and every day, over 2 million pieces of content are published, so without this focus on creating optimised content, it’s likely that yours will never get seen, heard, listened to or acted upon.

You must commit to not only consistently creating great, audience-centric content, but also regularly refreshing and analysing current content in order to stand a chance of cutting through the noise.