If your website has been around a while, but you are consistently getting low traffic, you might be frustrated and at a loss as to why. Many times, the reason is that your website doesn’t have enough content.
How content marketing makes your website more effective
If you are a service business, you might have a basic website that consists of several pages:
- Home– headline that says “Welcome to Acme Service Co”, a few pictures, a couple of paragraphs about what you do
- About– a picture of you and your team, a paragraph of text explaining the history and mission of the company
- Services– one headline and one paragraph each explaining your main services
- Contact– an email contact form along with your address & phone number
There’s nothing wrong with a website like that. In fact, your customers and leads might be glad to find all that info when they search for your brand on the web. The only problem comes if you want to get new customers by being discovered through search engines.
If you want to be found on the web via search, you’ll need more content and it needs to be in-depth and helpful.
A great example was given in the book “They Ask, You Answer” by Marcus Sheridan. (I’m not a marketing affiliate, that’s just a regular ol’ link and I get no money by this.)
The book uses the example of a company that sells fiberglass pools.
In the world of fiberglass pools, the biggest competitor is concrete pools. An average website for a fiberglass pool company might have the basic, bare-minimum pages that we described above– and probably doesn’t talk about concrete pools. Because… they install fiberglass. So why would they talk about concrete?
But hundreds or even thousands of people are searching the web for concrete vs fiberglass pools every month. That’s a lot of people who might potentially be perfect-fit customers, and a website that only talks about fiberglass pools would completely miss out on that chunk of search traffic.
What does this mean for your business? Brainstorm questions, objections, and concerns that your customers will be searching the web for. Every piece of content that you write has the potential to attract more traffic, and it all adds up to more leads.
Optimizing your content marketing to appear in search results
Sometimes, you have content but still aren’t getting the search traffic that you want. It could be that your website content needs to be optimized for search and for users. This is also known as on-page SEO, because it’s entirely within your website pages themselves and in your control.
Optimized content starts with high-quality content, but it also means looking at the code that organizes the content and makes it understandable to search engines. This includes your
- metadata
- page titles
- headings
- alt text for images
- URLs
- internal links
… and more.
Once you’ve optimized your content, you need to be sure that your website loads quickly and is easily accessible on all kinds of devices, from desktop computers to mobile phones and tablets.