“Content is King” has been the mantra of SEO practitioners ever since the concept of SEO made an appearance.
Whilst this was meant to be a simple and easily understandable mantra, we still see so many misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and wildly inaccurate explanations of something so simple.
What is content?
We know the answer appears to be really obvious, but for the sake of clarity, let’s cover this from the start.
Content is made up of:
- Website Main Pages – These are pages that explain your company, services, offers, packages, etc. that you or your organisation offer.
- Blogs/Articles – These are supplementary pages which are produced on a regular basis that explain, expand, contextualise, and explore the industry and/or products that you offer. These can be generic explanations, “How to” articles, industry related information, etc. that help underpin the subject matter of your website pages, products, services, etc. that you offer.
- Multi-media – These are video, images, animations that can also be vlogs, which are in essence the same as blogs/articles/pages, but presented in forms other than writing. Not all industries lend themselves to this kind of production, but also they can be expensive and time consuming to produce, which is why they are produced in much smaller volumes than written blogs/articles. Do bear in mind, we are not referring to social media productions such as TickTok, You-Tube, etc., as they are not generally part of your website content.
What is Relevance?
This is the essence of “Content is King”. When SEO practitioners talk about “content”, they do not mean any old content.
The content you produce must be relevant to the subject of your website, services you offer, or products that you sell.
It is of zero value, if the content you produce has little, tenuous, or no relevance to your general industry segment, or products/services you offer. So do not start writing about the best way to cook lamb, if you are in the construction business; unless of course you can build a brick oven that can beat all other ovens on the planet in cooking lamb!
What to write about?
One of the biggest questions is how do we continue to write about “Relevant” subjects. Surely, there comes a time that we run out of subject matter.
That is true but only if you are looking at content from a single point of view. There is always more than one way of approaching a subject.
Every subject has many aspects, and can be viewed in many different ways. Don’t be frightened to write about the same subject but looking through a different prism.
Your website reports and Google Analytics, combined with the Googles Search Console, will give you 100s of subjects and materials every month. You just have to know how to spot them, and pick them, in order to write a relevant article or blog to attract more traffic to your website.
How often should I write new content?
Firstly, you need to be careful about frequency. The regularity that you add new content to your website should be at a constant rate. Do not be tempted to write ten articles during the quiet times of your business cycle, then putting them all on the website in one go, and then forgetting about content writing for the next 10 months. Search Engines do not view this as 1 article per month!
By all means use your spare time to write 10 articles in one go, but then release them at a constant rate of 1 or 2 per month. The rate you release articles should be a rate that you know you can sustain in the long run.
Secondly, if you do write a batch of articles to be released over the next few months, check to make sure they are still relevant at the time of posting. In most industries things change fast, so what was relevant 10 months ago may no longer apply.
Finally, remember your website is not your Social Media page, so does not need lots of posts per day! Keep that for your Social Media accounts.
How much should I write?
In order to be indexed, your page must contain a minimum number of words, currently believed to be 250 to 300. Anything less, and your page will either not be indexed, or if it is indexed, search engines will display articles which are more in-depth.
Also, do not write a “War and Peace” novel. Average time on a website page is less than 20 seconds, and on blogs around 1 to 1.5 minutes, unless of course you grab the visitor’s attention.
So aim for a maximum of two A4 pages, which should be enough to cover most ever-day subjects reasonably.
Summary
Content is the only way you can ensure relevant traffic is attracted to your website. It also buys you authority from Search Engines, and wins you links from 3rd party websites. Therefore, spending time and energy on content is the best investment you can make for your website.
If you need help with your website content, contact us and let us help you produce the right content and improve your Search Engine visibility.