The Importance of Website Content

Importance of Website Content

Website content includes the visuals, copy, and pages that provide information and value to users. Marketers understand the importance of website content for driving customer engagement, improving brand awareness and authority, and increasing sales.

Are you paying attention to the quality of your website content?

With 90% of marketers leaning on engaging content to approach customers, you’re likely missing out if you aren’t putting in your best effort.

Great website content can make the difference in the eyes of your customers and Google rankings. But whether it’s underused or misunderstood, website content is often under-appreciated.

With a fresh focus on creating better experiences for customers, you’ll find that great content can have a massive impact on your business. We’ll discuss the importance of website content and offer some perspective from the user’s standpoint.

What Makes Good Content?

When people think of content, they often think of content marketing. As we’ll discuss, content marketing is a critical component of your website content, but it’s not the beginning and end of it.

Content is everything about your website that users take in to solve their problems. After all, any time a user visits your website, it’s because they have a need, whether it’s mindless entertainment or information for an essay. Your content determines if you can solve it for them, and how effective you are at doing it.

With that perspective, content is much more than a blog. It encompasses everything from your images and video to your white papers and checkout screens. Every word, visual, theme, color scheme, and link contribute to your website content.

Good content is purpose-driven, a component geared toward a target audience to be the best fit for their needs. It’s informative, easy to find, simple to navigate, and efficient. In general, users will find exceptional value in great content, and it helps your brand build credibility and a solid customer base.

The Importance of Website Content for SEO

Few digital marketing efforts are as critical as search engine optimization. If you want to create awareness and drive traffic to your website in the most cost-effective way, SEO is the best way to arrive at the top of Google pages.

Getting to the top of search engine results pages is the ultimate goal for any website.

Users rarely look past the first few results to answer their queries. And if you can land at the top of organic results, you immediately earn the user’s trust because the user trusts Google. When Google says, “This is the best answer to your question,” users will go along without questioning it.

When you get the rankings, you get the visibility, the traffic, and, ideally, the business. All of that hinges on your content. Let’s look at various content factors and how they relate to SEO.

Keywords and Linking

Keywords used to be the go-to ranking factor for search engines. Unfortunately, it had the negative effect of marketers using shady black hat techniques to get rankings at the sacrifice of the user.

Content could be awkward and often useless, but it ranked well because it had a ton of the right keywords. To everyone’s delight, search engines got their act together over time, and these tactics will now get you penalized in rankings.

Nonetheless, keywords are still an invaluable tool for search engines to return appropriate results. If wording exactly matches the words that users put into the search box, it’s likely more relevant than many other pages, even if the authority isn’t as high.

Choosing the right keywords positions your brand in the eyes of search engines. The more places you can add them, the tighter you can define your target audience and drive more meaningful traffic.

Like keywords, your linking strategy also helps search engines understand your website and its trustworthiness. As part of Google’s E-A-T ranking framework, trustworthiness is a vital component of getting to the top of results pages. You can help build your trustworthiness with strong backlinks to trusted, relevant pages.

Linking also eases navigation within a website. Your internal links can contribute as much to your website’s success as external links.

While bounces don’t affect SEO as much as some would believe, quality links can keep users engaged and drive them to take the action you desire. When you integrate a sound link-building strategy into your content, your SEO will improve along with the user experience.

Engagement

Quality content benefits SEO by being relevant, robust, easy to navigate, attractive, and information-rich. That’s one reason that a content strategy is so vital — it allows your website to develop a deep bag of content. It reinforces keywords across pages and creates more value to users.

Engaging in small business blogging is critical for gaining exposure. You can answer a ton of questions that are coming from your target market in a time-sensitive way.

When users are blowing up search engines trying to answer a question, keyword research can show you what information you can offer to drive traffic. And the more unique and informative that you can make your blog posts, the more it will engage users.

Recurring content like blogs gives you places to expand your link-building and keyword strategy for SEO while boosting your authority. And with evergreen content, you can continue to attract users looking for answers without having to do anything.

Of course, engagement is more than being full of relevant information. As mentioned, it needs to be attractive and easy to navigate.

You may have the most valuable information in the world. But if you present it in long paragraphs and text-heavy pages, users will lose interest and bounce elsewhere. If they leave your site, they most likely won’t return to do business with you.

When you make excellent content, you make it with engagement in mind. That means writing in concise, plain English and exchanging boring strings of text for shorter paragraphs. You can then use images, infographics, or even white space to improve your site and keep users engaged until they reach your CTAs.

Brand Authority and Trust

When you create content around your target audience’s needs and wants, you start to establish your brand authority. Website visitors who see value in your content are more likely to buy from you and become a loyal part of your following.

Satisfied users are also likely to promote you among like-minded peers on social media and elsewhere. You earn more traffic if you create content that engages, delights, and helps your target user.

Beyond your audience, excellent content boosts your authority in the eyes of other websites. Sure, you can buy an inbound link, but that may hurt you in rankings. Instead, if you create amazing content, other websites are more likely to link to your pages because they’re relevant and informative.

Lead Generation

Your website content can grab valuable customer data in a few ways. To start, an engaging blog post will keep your users interested in following through on your CTA. With content marketing, over 60% of B2C marketers are converting users to leads.

Search engine traffic is one essential area for drawing in leads, and quality content is how you get there. But organic traffic isn’t the only place to apply great content to get leads. Content is important to have for your lead magnets as well.

When you’re advertising through email, your website, or social media, you need to offer something to get user information. With a great content catalog, you can create a landing page offering that gets users from other channels to become leads.

User Action

Any content effort is done with a goal in mind. For most businesses, that includes selling their services or products. Everything boils down to it, even if your initial goals are building brand awareness or educating users.

Your content should be laid out with your conversion goals in mind. Giving users a pleasurable and intuitive layout will keep them on your page, give them more time to learn about your brand, and make decisions. Easy-to-find CTAs and content directed toward them will improve your chances of getting users to take action.

Is Your Content Strategy Working?

The importance of website content can’t be overstated — it’s the essence of your entire digital presence!

When you take the user-centric approach, you’ll understand that valuable content isn’t a search engine trick. It puts audiences first, supplying information that matches their intents. With a more user-friendly view of your content, you’ll find it much easier and more enjoyable to drive traffic and conversion.

Are you trying to get your content strategy working, but aren’t sure where to start? Check out our other articles about content and SEO at Title Console to learn how we use in-depth analytics to optimize website content and maximize conversion.

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