No matter how wonderful your SEO is or how much you spend on advertising, great content is essential if you want to transform your site’s traffic, into commercial success.
Why is content so important?
When people find interesting or valuable information on a site (great content), they are likely to take 4 steps. These 4 steps are what’s needed in order to develop a commercially successful site. Here’s what they do:
- They look around the site for more things to read.
- They return to the site regularly / subscribe to it’s RSS feed; so they don’t miss any new posts.
- They recommend the site to their friends and share it via social networks.
- Over a period of time, they will make an inquiry, information request or purchase (depending on the site’s business model.)
SEO & Content
No matter how great a site’s SEO is or how much traffic it attracts, it will not cause people to take any of the 4 steps above, unless the content of the site is powerful. SEO will help people find you, but when they find your site, it’s the quality of your content that will cause them to keep reading, revisit regularly and recommend you to people. Before someone will click your links, call you, email you or place an order, your content needs to inspire, compel or motivate them into action.
I described the importance of site content recently, by comparing it to what you find, when you check out a new TV channel that you see advertised. If you tune in and quickly see that the programming is dull. What do you do? You go and find something interesting to watch. You don’t simply keep watching just because you landed on that channel. Equally, you don’t set your DVR to record it’s shows and you don’t recommend the channel to your friends either.
The bottom line: No matter how well content is advertised or optimized, it’s what people find when they arrive that determines whether it succeeds or not.
If you are getting targeted traffic from your SEO, but these are NOT converting into customers / clients / inquiries, it’s time to rethink your content strategy. Spend some of that SEO time, or your SEO budget, on either hiring a local copywriter or learning how to write compelling copy yourself. Of course, as the quality of a site’s content improves, more sites are likely to link to it, which helps enormously with your SEO anyway!
The balance we are always looking for, is to be as easy to find as possible, by people with a need for our services; whilst ensuring that when they arrive, they value what they find enough, to take those 4 steps. Don’t be like the majority of small business owners, who focus most of their efforts on chasing traffic, retweets, diggs, stumbles etc – Whilst neglecting their content.
It’s all about getting the balance right, with effective SEO and great copy. That’s how you transform your site into a business generating machine.
IMPORTANT: If you want to make more sales, boost your profits and grow an amazing business, this will help you!