Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) professionals since the dawn of the SEO industry (way back in, oooh, 1997) have trumpeted the mantra that “content is king”. They work on persuading their clients to develop more and better content, reasoning that, if they do, it will play an important role in improving their organic search engine rankings. And so it will. Yet twelve years on, in places where SEO people congregate away from the prying ears of their clients and other normal people, I still hear them bemoaning the fact that many of their clients just don’t “get it”.
It’s undoubtedly true that many website owners don’t fully understand the benefits of great web content. Often the typical reaction of a business owner to suggestions for content development is along the lines of "how little can we get away with", because it's all a bit of a pain and they don't really see the point. However, when an SEO tells me that a client doesn’t understand the need for improved content, I generally tell them “that’s probably true, but it’s your fault”.
Entrepreneurs these days know only too well that Google is important to their businesses. If they don’t understand the commercial benefit of quality content, that’s probably because the SEO hasn’t explained it very well.
When SEOs talk about web content, they will generally argue things like;
• Users search for a wide variety of information before purchasing products
• It’s much easier to optimise a web page for search if it is focussed on a single topic
• Having more pages in your website boosts its authority in search engines, and boosts its link popularity due to the interlinking between internal pages
• Having quality content and resources on your site attracts links from other sites, which help boost your search rankings
• Having a bigger and better website enables you to rank higher for key phrases
• Covering a wider range of topics enables you to rank prominently for more long-tail phrases, and generate increased traffic from people searching around your subject(s) at an early stage of the buying cycle.
• Quality content generates social media “buzz”
All of these things are essentially true, but I think they rather miss the point. I'd like to suggest a different way of looking at the same issue, which might help both to focus digital marketers on genuinely value-adding content, and help business owners to "get it."
I suggest we stop thinking about “adding content to websites”. Instead, we should be thinking about identifying and fulfilling customer needs, and about seeking out gaps in the market for information, then capitalising on them. Because really, they are all the same thing. Web marketers want to add content, because it boosts links, traffic, search rankings and stickiness.
But not all content does this - only content which fulfils a need will achieve these goals. If you write about something that no-one is interested in, or which has been covered in depth already on numerous other sites, it won’t have much impact. This is why web marketers demand content that is “unique and compelling”. But that’s just webspeak for “stuff people want”.
Adding well written material to a website will never do any harm as such, and because we all know that it's easy to be lax about targeting it properly. But there IS a significant cost to most worthwhile content initiatives, even if it's "just" the business owner’s time (actually, that's the most precious resource of all). The content that generates most traffic for a website is that which covers material that is searched for a lot and that is not well covered on many other established sites on the internet. This stuff is easy to SEO, and compelling to link to. In other words, content for which there is demand (evidenced by the search volumes) and a lack of adequate supply.
Most entrepreneurs understand instinctively the value of identifying needs and fulfilling them, or of identifying gaps in the market. Economists call it “identifying an imbalance between supply and demand”. I call it “offering stuff people want”. When entrepreneurs select products and services to sell, they consider carefully what the customers they will be reaching would like to buy. Matching potential buyers with the right product in the right place at the right price is the very essence of marketing. In the offline world, you probably do this instinctively. If you are a caterer setting up a stand at the end of a cross country run, you probably know people will be thirsty, right? And they will be low on carbs? So you offer long cold drinks and high-energy foods, not espresso and canapés.
It’s really not so different when looking for people’s needs online. Most are actually fairly obvious, and many are still much less well catered for than in the more mature offline world, so there are more opportunities online to steal a march on the competition. The first thing to grasp, which may require something of a mind-shift, is that information, images, software and other resources that can be obtained from websites are not simply there to describe or promote a product offering, they are part of it. What I urge website owners to do is to try and empathise more with their customers and prospects. Get inside their heads, think what they are doing online, what motivates them, what goals are they trying to accomplish, and what website resources would help them accomplish their goals.
In particular, think what information or resources your customers and prospects want or need when they are searching the internet during, or shortly before, they enter the buying cycle for your product or service. Think what they need to make them buy, or just to make them happy. If you don’t know, ask them! Do some research, or have your agency do it for you. Lots of anecdotal evidence of what people are looking for can be found from the Google keyword tools that show you how many people search for various words and phrases each month. You ideally need to do some further research though, because you have to think of the words before you can check their search volumes, and also because many words and phrases have lots of different meanings and contexts. Think hard about everything that could help your customers, and think laterally too. For example, if you are selling baby products, it may be a very good idea to offer information and resources that help people through pregnancy, even if you don’t offer any products that people need before the baby is born. Maybe information on maternity and paternity rights for employees too. By doing this, you reach your target audience just before they become active purchasers, you associate your site with the reason for their need for your products (a baby), and they start to build a positive relationship with your brand.
It’s generally not a good idea to be too peripheral in your choice of content, because the resources have to have an obvious association with your brand, but they shouldn’t be too constrained either. So information about selecting and buying a car would be fine on a site selling car insurance, or driving lessons, but probably not on a site selling jewellery, even though we know people who wear jewellery also buy cars. The key is to tune in to what is on the customer’s mind at the time they carry out the search. Trying to distract them from what they are doing to think about something else, in the way that traditional media advertising works, is not the right way to approach search marketing and will be very ineffective.
Once you’ve identified what information and resources people desire, you can then investigate how readily available it is, consider whether that which is not readily available fits with your brand, and look at how the need could be fulfilled. You may sometimes identify content which is so valuable it can be a revenue stream in its own right. More often, you will identify stuff which realistically needs to be given away, but instead of thinking of this as “search engine fodder”, look at it as an exercise in brand-building, or as a means of attracting customers to frequent your online establishment, thereby presenting you with the opportunity for cross-selling.
Restaurants and other businesses sometimes offer soft play areas for children, free of charge. They do this because it draws people in to their premises rather than their neighbours, and because it enhances the customer experience, and may encourage repeat visits and recommendations. It’s sound business sense and no-one thinks it’s weird. Well, those play areas are a fine example of what your web designer means when he/she talks about “unique and compelling content”. Stuff people want, in other words.
What about the payback, I hear? What’s the business case? That’s an easy one. If you are able to identify a particular resource that your target audience needs, such as a software product or some in-depth research, consider whether the cost of providing this resource for free might actually be a more cost effective way of reaching your audience than advertising. Look at the available search volumes, think about what share of them you may capture, and factor in link growth and the impact on your overall rankings and web footprint. If a web resource has a long shelf-life, it will go on attracting links, social media references, referrals and visitors for years, but if you spend the money on advertising instead, it could be gone in a few weeks or even days. Content initiatives always have to be looked at with a medium or long term view, so they aren’t the best use of funds if you are looking to shift a lot of turkeys before Christmas and it’s already the 18th December. But over the longer term, providing resources that meet customer needs or wants, backed up with solid but simple SEO, will almost always earn a greater ROI than any kind of advertising.
My conclusion? Contrary to widely circulated rumours in the online marketing world, “content” is not king. The customer is king, or queen. Always has been, and always will be. Give customers the stuff they want and they will come running to your door, or clicking to your website, in droves. It’s the search engines job to help people find the stuff they want and, on the whole, it’s a job they do pretty well. Concentrate on meeting your customer’s needs and desires, and SEO will soon become a whole lot easier and more rewarding.
Author: Barry Mills, Chairman, Netstep