Most entrepreneurs start their businesses because they have a passion for the products they sell or services they offer. The average business owner doesn’t plan on being a professional online marketer or SEO copy manager themselves, but these skills are critical for business success in the modern world.
Not taking full advantage of copywriting for online marketing keeps your business from being seen by the most important people that contribute to your bottom line: the customers searching for your products or services. To understand why customers just aren’t finding your business online, the first step is to learn the basics of how to make sure the search engines show your pages to customers.
#1 – Please the Search Engines with SEO Content or Be Hidden Forever
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complex process that includes site design and structure, but the king of all the ranking boosters is high-quality content. While a website should structurally be designed to load quickly, have appropriate meta tags, and feature other design specifications that please Google and other search engines, the greatest impact that can quickly be seen is usually due to professional SEO copywriting. Nothing helps a company’s online visibility faster than adding more pages and content to their site that can all be indexed and searched for by consumers.
To understand why this is, consider that you have a basic website with 1-3 main pages and a few small side pages with a short “about us”, services list, contact information, etc. Your main opportunity to get ranked will hinge on those 1-3 main pages that have sufficient content for crawlers (bots used to parse web pages) to analyze. This gives you very little wiggle room to have anything less than top-quality content on those few pages to even have a shot at ranking on the first page when a consumer is searching for the products or services you offer.
Now, imagine that you decide to expand your website. Adding just 5-10 pages of comprehensive, quality content on a variety of topics related to your business will give you a far greater number of pages that can each rank for a wider variety of keywords and phrases than your original site. This helps customers find you in the huge online maze with millions of buying options.
Guidelines for Rankable Quality Content
- Content should never be sparse or duplicated
- Unique, in-depth coverage of topics is best
- Avoid keyword stuffing and auto-generated content
- Focus on small keyword groups per page and use semantic variants
- Build up your website gradually and consistently over time
For more details, Search Engine Land’s Guide on quality content is a very thorough guide. Of course, if you want to focus your efforts on your business and don’t have a large enough company to hire a staff writer, you can always look for a local freelance copywriter for hire.
A good writer who specializes in website copywriting services can work with businesses to identify keywords to target, brainstorm article topics, and produce pages that please people as well as search engines. Well-researched, helpful content is key to ranking well in search engines and pleasing the customers who visit your pages. When your website content shows your value and authority, it will result in increased traffic and increased sales.