Even with a completed website, your search engine marketing (SEM) shouldn’t end there. Updating existing content by providing a steady stream of blogs, building out your website pages to help with your website SEO content. From there, it’s about finding out your best options, which should be guided by three factors: relevance of content, ease of implementation, and ease of creation. Below we look over three sources of new content and how they relate to these three principles.
Blogs: Good for SEO and Good for Sharing
A lot of websites have a blog section, and for a good reason: blogs are an easy way to insert more content into your website without expanding sitemaps or menus. Your blogs go into a feed, and all that content get crawled by search engines to produce content. Looking at the three factors:
- Relevance of Content: Easy. Blogs are often written like articles, talking about interesting topics or events of your business. This allows you to cherry-pick keyword terms, as well as produce content ready to share on social media.
- Ease of Implementation: Moderate. Modern CRMs have blog options already installed on the site, though it does require a little knowledge to upload blogs. Your mileage will vary depending on the backend you have (we use WordPress).
- Ease of Creation: Hard. Writing blogs is time intensive. You’ve got to put in a lot of work and content on each blog for it to be useful. The content has to be well written, interesting from title to content, and be formatted properly – including images, headers, and more.
Check out our blog, How Blogs on Your Website Equal More Website Visits, for more details on SEO impacts on what to write.
Targeting Interest to Expand Cornerstone Content
Where do visitors go when they are on your website? Using tools like Google Analytics, you can map traffic to sections and pages of your site. If you find a page beyond the home page people are visiting a lot, think about expanding it. This could be expanding your services page with sub-pages on each service, expanding your “About Us” page with more company and staff info, or talking more about the process as a whole.
- Relevance of Content: Moderate. You’ve got to use the right tools and talk to customers to get an idea of what questions you can answer (and what interests you can grab) online. With the right tools, you can expand the keywords that are the cornerstones of your business.
- Ease of Implementation: Hard. Unless you’ve built your website yourself, you’ll have to work with your existing or a new web developer to upload and format your new content.
- Ease of Creation: Moderate. You’ll be writing about topics you already understand, which should be easy to expand upon. It’s important to understand what questions you need to answer for your customers, as well as using the right voice.
If you’re looking to expand pages, a good place to start is industry-specific pages. Check out our blog, Industry Specific Website Pages You Need for Your Site for five common pages.
Bringing Offline Content Online or More Accessible
One great option, especially for long-established brands, is bringing your offline content such as brochures, instructions, specification sheets, and other printed or print-ready content online to your website. A variation is taking already uploaded digital content that is “locked in” like PDFs and text-laden images and transfer that content to a web page where bots can better crawl the keywords.
- Relevance of Content: Moderate. Do you have the content, and would that content be interesting to your customers and SEO bots? Those are the questions you need to answer.
- Ease of Implementation: Hard. Just like with expanding content, unless you’ve built your website yourself, you’ll have to work with your existing or a new web developer to upload and format your new content.
- Ease of Creation: Easy. You’ve already got the content: you just need to type it up. Using a modern scanner or turning the print-ready documents into PDFs allow you to pull the text directly from the content. Same goes for already digital content.
Not sure if the content is worth posting? Take a look at our 6 Pointers for Creating Great Website Content for more details.
This content can be a lot of work, but you’re not alone. From marketing consultation for knowing what to use, to website development and blog outsourcing to remove the difficulty of implementation, Vision can help. Contact us to learn more about the comprehensive marketing services we provide and how it can help your business with search engine marketing and beyond.
