Content Strategy for Your Website
I was in a client meeting yesterday, discussing content strategy and how it relates to their need for SEO and better conversions. We’ve made some really good progress in a super-competitive area the last three months, but were having trouble converting visitors and wanted to expand our SEO footprint.
The CEO asked me, “Is it better to have several pages that are always changing, or to have a site that is constantly growing with new content?”
The VP of Sales laughed out loud when I answered that question, “Yes!”
We all know that fresh content is vital to SEO success. It’s also important for visitor conversion. And, it’s important to not only have your most prominent pages (home page, etc…) “freshen up” every now and then, it’s also important to push out new content on a regular basis.
From a search engine standpoint – it gets spiders coming back more frequently, which gets you indexed more thoroughly, more often, and often better. From a visitor standpoint, it gives you the opportunity to excite and engage the visitor more.
More and more, we are seeing that visitors need more than a catchy landing page, a great offer, or a slick form to turn in to leads or customers. Search is becoming less and less a direct conversion tool, and more of a sales process that you need to nurture in order to get the customer.
Of course, this rings true a little more for larger ticket item purchases than for, say, a book or pair of shoes.
What does this mean for your business? For one, you need to craft all your content with an eye for the ultimate goal – conversion. You need to come up with a schedule and stick to it (this is much harder than it sounds). You will need to create content that is interesting and useful for someone, even if they aren’t your customer. You need to give options to share your content (social bookmarking buttons, email this buttons, etc…) – and encourage people to use them.
In short – your website needs to start to become a combination of promotion and enhanced conversion strategies, and real substance.