The Importance of Effective Website Content
Establish a successful digital presence
If you want to establish a successful digital presence, then it’s vital that your website is populated with quality, relevant, regular and unique content. Content generally consists of the use of text, imagery, videos or even interactive elements. Your homepage is often your only opportunity to create a positive lasting impression, so you have to make it count.
The design and visual look of a website is definitely an important factor, but what use is great design if the level of content is uninspired, infrequent, and dull? Having a clear and effective message will retain visitors, maintain (and even improve) your SEO ranking, and also ensures your business isn’t negatively impacted.
To be able to maintain a good, or even great search engine ranking on Google, and also be able to retain site visitors, your website’s content needs to clearly show the service/product a customer wants and take them there quickly. This can be easily done with a call to action, which essentially guides visitors to content.
If you were to look at another brands website. Can you identify what the website is about? Is it clear what products and services it’s offering, and most importantly is the content up-to-date, and engaging?
Now ask yourself whether your own website is as effective? Does it capture the user’s attention? Can people find what they want in only a few clicks/or taps? Is it a simple and memorable (for the right reasons) user experience? If your website fails this simple test then it’s likely that you’re driving people away.
Many people who browse the internet will do so on their smartphone or tablet devices, usually while they’re doing something else. So, how do you grab their attention? It’s also been proven that 55% of visitors will spend less than 15 seconds on a website’s homepage. It’s correct to assume that this is probably the only chance you’ll get to form a good impression.
First impressions matter, and by engaging a visitor from the start you can keep them there.
One of the most important reasons for having current, relevant and quality content is for SEO purposes. Search engines crawl websites on the internet, looking for keywords to determine what your page or website is about. This is why your website’s purpose must be clearly defined.
Content is pivotal to increasing awareness of your brand/product/service, and this all comes down to the keywords in use. Keywords are what your customers and clients will be searching for, and including these within your content will boost your search ranking. Don’t go over the top though, Google will punish you for using the same keyword too often.
Google has a ranking algorithm which automatically searches the entire contents of a page. The titles you’ve used — and the associated metadata — is then used by Google to rate your website. Clever use of keywords and metadata are the quickest way to process pages on your website and boost your online ranking. If you take this into consideration and structure your website content accordingly then this will maximise the search engine ranking potential.
Now you’ll have more of an idea of how content is relevant to a visitor, and also how it’s indexed or ranked according to Google. The next step is to make sure that your website is able to easily direct customers to the information/service/product they require.
This is achieved by CTAs — or a Call-to-Action. Generally, these are interactive buttons or links which can take a visitor to where they want to go directly, often at the click/tap of a button, and this should always be achievable in as little as 2 – 3 clicks.
For more information about how to get the best out of your website, or even how to craft engaging, informative and effective website content, contact us at Verse.