Your website is totally unique to you, and in our eyes it is too! Unfortunately, search engines come eyeless and many aspects of a website look quite similar to them. The shared code required for structural components, i.e. navigation menus or columns, doesn’t really distinguish your site from much else. So how can you show a service like Google how special your website is?
The most basic manner through which a search engine can better understand your site is through text. This is why you’ll see web designers constantly talking about stuff like “alt-text”, accompanying captions that describe media content, or “keywords” and “meta tags”. Text is king when it comes to your site.
Content marketing, for SEO, is simply the practice of implementing… well, content. This might be considered as an article, guide, review or blog post, but content marketing services are just as concerned with email newsletters, social networking and video content.
Spiders and Unique Webs
If anyone was wondering, Google certainly doesn’t suffer from arachnophobia. In a process known as “crawling”, programs known as crawlers, or spider-bots, intensely scan through all of a new page’s content to better define the site. After this, it’s indexed and placed into actual search rankings.
When you have a content marketing strategy, you can be more active in the defining of your site. As your content is your own, it is unique, meaning it can differentiate your site from similar or competing pages.
Your website’s “bounce-rate” is the measure of how many visitors leave your site after visiting only one page. Investing in a steady-growing collection of unique and interesting content encourages visitors to spend longer on your site, translating to the spiders that your site is valuable.
Professional SEO services help you to find gaps in the market for relevant, enlightening content that just isn’t out there yet, allowing your site to perform more healthily in the search rankings.
The more the merrier (as long as it’s good)
Gone are the days where a large chunk of sites were a sentence or two, or even a simple promise of “coming soon”. Now, modern SEO techniques can rapidly spot an empty, sparse or poorly-managed page and lose no sleep over sending it straight to the bottom of the rankings. Faced with this new technology, there is a real need for effective content marketing strategies.
By contributing regular, well-written content, your website is seen as valuable. As a happy consequence to writing content relevant to your business, you are continuously reaffirming to a search engine that you sell hedge trimmers, offer hairdressing services, run a car dealership, or whatnot. Then, by virtue of investing in that steady stream of helpful or entertaining content, your business is made more accessible to a larger number of customers.
Many digital marketing companies wrongly enforce an apathetic approach of “the more, the merrier”. Just like Goldilocks and her bears, there’s danger in too little and too much. When bad content marketers focus solely on huge quantity, they run a risk of making unnatural content, outlandishly filled with keywords, just to manipulate the search algorithm. That’s not good content.
Although your content is “read” by search engines, they are really experienced by people. Therefore, the trick to consistent high-ranking performance is to simply create content that is quality, informative, useful and authentic. Now this is quite an undertaking, which is why it’s sometimes great to have a little assistance.
At Shtudio, we don’t just offer content marketing services, but also appreciate how valuable a website is to an individual or organisation. Whether you’re desperate to declare full content marketing campaign (Hurrah!) or simply need a little advice on how to better optimise your site, feel free to get in touch.