Most businesses sets up a website with specific goals in mind. The most common goals of a well-designed website with optimised content are to:
- Generate targeted traffic, leads and sales, convert visitors into customers.
- Build brand and business image.
- Improve search engine ranking.
- Attract relevant back links from related quality websites to increase its credibility.
- Engage with the market and build relationships.
- Establish the business as a thought leader.
A well optimised website is key and an integral part of the business’ web marketing strategy. This requires a focus on careful search engine optimisation (or SEO) through high quality content that adds value and helps the business achieve its goals.
Why SEO
With effective SEO, a website becomes more ‘crawlable’ by the search engines, making each page on the website easy to find and access. SEO is an effective marketing technique that uses relevant key-phrases and optimised quality content to make the site more engaging and attractive to search engines. This makes the website more visible, increasing its inbound links and traffic.
From the above, it is clear that SEO and high quality content must work together to make a website successfully achieve its goals.
Marketing with Google must focus on quality content oriented towards the reader. An optimised content strategy is not only important for organic search traffic, but also for social sharing, since businesses must also leverage social media marketing to be successful. Recently, Google posted about another step to reward high-quality sites endorsing this, implying that websites that cared about ranking in the search engine results must develop an optimised content marketing strategy.
Why optimised content?
By definition, optimised content marketing involves understanding what the business’ targeted traffic (visitors) are looking for and featuring optimised content with the keywords to drive organic search traffic that converts. It also means delivering this content in the proper format and socialising it across the business’ social networks so that visitors can share and link to it.
Content can take the form of web page content, blogs, news, press releases, tutorials, case studies, white papers, social media updates and event information. Optimised content is critical for marketing with Google for the following reasons:
- Google factors social signals into its organic search algorithms. Social media and social networking promote relationships, which bring in relevance. Relevance is what organic search results are all about. This increases inbound links, which endorse the website’s credibility. Businesses must focus on Twitter retweets and followers, Google +1s, friends and circles, Facebook fans, Likes and Shares, YouTube views and subscribers and LinkedIn shares and connections, all of which means engaging optimised content.
- Over the last year or so, Google has steadily updated its algorithms to weed out sites that featured bad quality content, bogus sites, link farms, and sites using spammy methods to rank higher. Google made it clear that sites producing relevant content and building back links naturally would be the ones who would survive and flourish.
- Google introduced the +1 button just over a year ago to encourage users to recommend the site. This is perceived as a social signal that directly impacts organic search rankings. Users are more likely to endorse a site when the site is optimised for the keywords used by them.
- In January 2012, Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World where a business’ published content on Google+ can be found by others in its circles. This gives the business’ content a larger reach over a longer time.
Besides the above, content is measurable to gauge its impact on a business’ search engine ranking, visitors, conversions and social impact. Businesses can leverage content to gain competitive advantage.