How your website’s content can make or break your website’s health

High-quality content is extremely valuable for a website and content marketing is one of the best approaches for retailing your website and business online. Posting regular and relevant information on your website helps to boost search engine optimisation (SEO) and also helps in positioning yourself as an expert in your field. However, when content is done wrong, it can have detrimental effects on your website.

This is why content marketing should be at the heart of any digital campaign. Behind every great brand is a wealth of valuable and relevant content that really connects with the company’s audience. But you may still be wondering, why is content marketing SO important?

Content: any information that lives on the web and can be consumed on the web

Wordstream

To help understand the importance of content, we’ve put together a list of the top advantages that content marketing can provide your website and business. After all, content is king…right?

5 reasons why content is important for your website’s health

1) Adds value to your website

Writing content that is unique, original or exclusive to your readers provides real value to your website. Your audience is visiting your website with specific intentions or goals in mind. During each visit, the quality and value of the content that is presented can determine whether the visitor stays or leaves. People are more likely to read and share your content if it provides value to them. In other words, the secret is to discover what your visitors want and then give it to them.

2) Drives more sales

Building trust is vital in generating more sales and writing quality content is an easy way to do this. Producing great content allows you to establish yourself as an industry thought leader that brings customers back to your website time after time. In terms of sales generation, good content can be especially useful if you know how to drill down your target demographics and guide them to the purchase. A way to do this is to publish product-specific content such as FAQs, product reviews, and instructional videos or blog posts as this can help reassure potential customers and encourage them to make a purchase.

Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.

Content Marketing Institue

3) Improves SEO

One of the benefits of publishing good content is that it will increase the number of people who find your website through search engines. Search engines love content, especially content that is regularly updated.

However, for your content to be effective, people need to find it. Well-written, optimised, high-quality content that uses appropriate keywords and inbound links makes it easier for your content to be found by your customers.

E-A-T and SEO

You’ve probably heard the buzzword E-A-T floating around recently and to rank well on Google, you need to nurture your brand by building its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (which is what E-A-T stands for).

This means that you should focus on writing quality, relevant and shareable content so search engines see you as a valuable brand for your audience.

4) Builds brand awareness

Content marketing is the best and the most effective way of building brand awareness to new audiences at a very low cost. Building brand awareness through advertising and PR can be very expensive. If done correctly, the right content can do wonders for your brand by increasing relevant traffic to your site and letting people know about your brand who never knew if your brand ever existed.

5) Helps to build links

If you want other websites to link to your website then content is the key. If you are publishing killer content, then other websites will naturally want to link to it.

Depending on the site that has linked to yours, you may quickly benefit from an increase in traffic and Domain Authority (DA). DA is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A DA score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. Therefore, you should aim to gain links from websites with higher DA scores to help give your own websites DA a boost.

Read our blog “Backlink FAQs: What Are Backlinks And Why Are They Important?” to find out more about backlinks.

Tips on creating more EPIC content

Now you know why good content is essential for your website. Let’s look at how you can produce that killer content.

1) Carry out keyword research

While we’ve already identified that your main goal should be to create audience-centric content, keyword research is important to ensure that your content can be found through search engines.

Google’s Keyword Planner is the best tool to use when researching what keywords to use in your content and it’s free. But of course, there’s a catch – you need a Google Ads account to use it. However, you can set up an account easily without needing to have any active campaigns running to use the tool.

Keyword Planner gives you two options to get started, which are:

1. Find keywords: Get keyword ideas that can help you reach people interested in your product or service.
2. Get search volume and forecasts: See search volume and other historical metrics for your keywords, as well as forecasts for how they might perform in the future.

When choosing what keywords to include in your content, we recommend choosing keywords with high monthly searches with low competition. This just means that it’ll be easier to rank for these keywords.

When writing your content, don’t use loads of different keywords as search engines will not know which keyword you want to rank for. Look for one primary keyword and one or two secondary keywords to optimise your content with.

2) Include internal links throughout your content marketing

Internal links are links that point to other pages that are on the same domain. They are commonly used in main navigation and are useful for three reasons:

1. Allow users to navigate a website.
2. Help establish information hierarchy for the given website.
3. Spread link equity (ranking power) around websites.

When writing your content you may want to link to another blog post or to your services, contact page or a specific product for example. The deeper within your website the internal link is, the more valuable it is.

3) Optimise the page metadata

Metadata is information that provides an overview of what the webpage content is about. Metadata is shown in search results using keywords relevant to the content on the page and is made up of two parts; a page title – or meta title – and meta description.

The main purpose of metadata is to entice users to click through to your website. When you show a compelling and informative meta title and description, users are more likely to click on your page.

For more tips and best practices on optimising your content’s metadata, check out our blog “Beginner’s Guide to Writing Metadata”.

Let’s recap

Dedicating resources to developing a high quality, comprehensive content strategy is the only way to ensure your content is heard above the noise.

Remember to plan your content carefully and think about your audiences needs first. What does your audience need help with? Are there any issues you can solve for them? What questions can you answer authoritatively? Work out how to address these and tie it back to your products and services. Once you’ve nailed this, your website will be moving up the rankings in no time.