In the glorious world of SEO, you will often hear the term ‘content is king’.
We are guilty of using this phrase ourselves and find ourselves advising most clients that they need to create more content on their site.
Not only will more content increase the number of pages that you have on your site, which will immediately improve the potential for ranking well on the search engines (remember – search engines rank pages, not sites) but it can do great things for both conversion and link building.
Improvements in conversion should be fairly self explanatory – using language that your audience uses (after diligent keyword research) will help engage with your site users and there will be an inherent sense that you appreciate their needs and are more likely to be able to help them.
The benefit to link building efforts is often overlooked, and yet good content / functionality is one of the most effective long term link building strategies.
By offering stimulating content on your site, it is far easier to encourage other sites to link to yours. When analysing possible link opportunities, you should always ask yourself why that site should link to yours. If there is no compelling reason, then you should create one by generating content that their users will find interesting.
You should also ensure that your content is as accessible as possible – the simple addition of an RSS feed can make a huge difference to the effectiveness of the new content. We are often surprised at where our content ends up but, by including links to other areas of our site, we are continuing to grow the links back to our site.
There is also no doubt that Google loves new, fresh content and sites that continue to publish new content do well in the search results. Whilst these improvements are often fairly short lived, regular content additions can sustain a regular stream of traffic as a direct result of new content.
To illustrate this point, the following graph shows a snapshot of traffic to the www.browsermedia.co.uk website since June 30th:
As shown in the graph, our traffic is reasonably consistent (with a consistent drop at the weekends) but there are notable spikes.
If you compare these spikes to the publication dates of new content, there is a clear pattern – there is a boost in traffic when we publish new content on the site.
Not only are these boosts temporal in nature, we would be lying if we claimed that the boost in traffic always generated a boost in new business enquiries but we believe that it is worth the relatively small effort of publishing regular content as the longer term benefit of the links that it generates is unquestionable.
Yes, it takes effort to maintain but there is no such thing as a free lunch and you will be rewarded for your efforts, even it if takes some time to appreciate (one of the eternal frustrations of SEO). An investment in content is a good one.
Contact us today if you would like to find out more about effective content.
