Content is obviously very much on the mind of everyone at Vertical Leap recently, what with Emily’s blog on Why content is important for SEO, Tom’s on 3 quick tips on writing search-friendly content and Joe on The Rise Of Content Marketing. I thought I would add to the fray with some more thoughts on why content is good.
- The more content you write, the more different ways you express your product or service in slightly different phraseology. Given that a huge percentage of Google queries are unique, you never know which turn of phrase you use will match the exact query that a user types in. With a trend towards longer search queries as users get more sophisticated the less results there are that might match what they type, and the greater chance of you picking up a long tail query.
- Another reason for having a good number of words on each page, as Emily suggests you should do, is that the content therefore becomes a larger element of the page. Go and look at an average web page – how much of the page is made up of navigational elements, menus, sign up boxes and footers? Having a decent amount of content allows the search engines to more accurately assess the individual content of a page and classify what is unique and what is repeated across the site. This is particularly important if you have an e-commerce website, where hundreds of products might only have a 10 word description, which makes them unappealing to the engines in terms of differentiation. It is not a co-incidence that if you type a product query, the top results all have pages that give you additional information about the product, not just the basic outline.
- The third reason is that users read content. The research phase of a buying process may take some time, and people are more likely to bookmark useful content to come back to later. This gives you a good chance of being on their short list when they actually come to buy your product or service. And after all, your website isn’t just for search engines – that’s just a way of getting people to your site. After that, it is the content that needs to convert them.
- Useful content is just that – useful! It has a potential life beyond your pages, with people linking to it, bookmarking it, promoting it and tweeting it.
So some of these reasons are out and out SEO reasoning and some not. Although we tend to concentrate on the optimisation reasons for doing things in this blog, we are constantly aware that there is always a bigger picture.
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