ClickThrough’s senior online copywriter Oliver Pyper knows a thing or two about website content. It’s his job, after all.
On the surface, the benefits of good on-page content are simple. It helps sell your brand, and your products. It paints a picture of your company and your values – setting you up as trustworthy, powerful, caring, local, international, knowledgeable, easy to get along with, or all of the above.
But underneath, there’s more going on. Website content is a crucial part of an integrated digital marketing strategy – a scaffold which provides solid support for SEO and PPC campaigns. I’ve put together this quick guide to help you get to grips with the inner workings of web content.
Boost rankings and ensure customers see the best of your brand.
- On-page content is hugely important for SEO.
- Unique, relevant, keyworded content boosts rankings and encourages users to convert.
- Accurate content shows Google and customers your brand is professional and trustworthy.
Well-written website content is an SEO essential…
Content is the side of SEO your customers see. The words on your site help search engines decide how to rank your site, and are users’ first glimpse into your brand, and your products or services. It’s a key part of any SEO strategy, and one of the most useful tools for turning visitors into customers.
After Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, quality content is more important than ever. If Google’s web spiders detect duplicated or keyword-stuffed content, they’ll issue hefty penalties, which can mean huge drops in rankings. The same goes for misspellings, bad grammar and repetition.
On the other hand, unique, accurate and relevant content with a wide variety of keywords is a big boon for your SEO.
…and can boost PPC ROI
Web content can make PPC campaigns work better, too. Populating PPC landing pages with informative, relevant content means your quality score could increase – which means your click costs could decrease.
And by optimising product descriptions for Google Shopping, you can make product listing ads much more clickable.
The 2013 approach to website content
A solid set of keywords is crucial to good content. On a solid foundation of keywords, you can build great website content that helps SEO and PPC too.
But it’s no good stuffing copy with keywords to the point where it reads unnaturally. Here’s a good web copy rule of thumb: if you lose the message, you lose everything.
If you’re a content writer, your primary goal should be to inform, persuade and reassure. Every sentence you write for website content should be doing one of these things. Everything else is waffle.
This might not appear conducive to the old way of doing things – when great leaps of imagination were required to fit long tail keywords into copy, without losing its core message.
But as search engines have cottoned on to bad copy, it’s actually made it easier to write content that reads naturally.
It’s much better nowadays to have a wide spread of keywords, with synonyms and alternate phrasings sprinkled here and there to support your core keyword(s).
