Website Content
Why Content Isn't The Only King
When it comes to online marketing, content is king. But when creating content for your website, never forget the customer is king too.
Long live the King!
Way back in January, 1996, a certain Bill Gates declared, "Content is king".
This was when the internet was still in its infancy, and a time when the leading tech entrepreneurs of the day were beginning to grasp the endless possibilities that an online world could offer.
The reason Bill Gates thought content was king was because he saw the internet becoming "a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products -a marketplace of content".
And that's exactly what it has become. A marketplace of content.
When it comes to your website and online marketing today, you will hear those three same words over and over again. Content is king!
That's because we go online to find content, whether that be the written word, videos, or images of cats that make us LOL.
So, if you want some of those people to visit your website, you need content.
Then you need to direct them to your content. A visitor to your site might follow a link to it from another web page or a social media post, for example, but the most common way will be by finding you via a Google search.
What's interesting is that Google wasn't even a thing when Bill Gates wrote his Content Is King essay. Google was founded two years later, in 1998, although there were other search engines available at the time, including Lycos and AltaVista, organising content in a searchable way.
The reason Google is now the undisputed king of the search engines is because it delivers the best search results. In fact, Google has become Bill Gates' marketplace of content and it's why content is still king today.
Which also makes Google a kingmaker of sorts.
It can make your website a king or a pauper in terms of the number of visitors it sends to its pages.
If Google's search algorithms determine that your content is better than the content of your competition, you will appear at the top of the search result pages. By ranking well for key search terms, your business will thrive, making it crucial that your web pages contain the quality of content Google is looking to reward.
Given its ability to make or break a business online, it's not difficult to see why some webmasters create content solely to find favour with Google.
Some content providers and SEO professionals play on this desire by peddling a never mind the quality, feel the width kind of approach. They take the "content is king" mantra and then sell you on the idea that any old content will do as long as there is lots of it. This leads to the production of page after page of poorly crafted content with the sole intention of gaming Google. Things like hundreds of pages of near-duplicate content with the odd word changed here or there. Examples of this are "reworked" content from Wikipedia or what Google calls out as doorway pages.
This type of thin, worthless content can rank for a time, particularly for non-competitive search terms, but it is just as likely to see your website penalised and banished from Google's rankings. And if you want to know how good your SEO people really are, get them to recover you from a Google "manual action" (Google are too polite to use the word, penalty).
Content written for search engines also goes down like a lead balloon with visitors to your website. What's more, the search engines know this. They take into account factors such as dwell time, how long a visitor spends on a page before returning to the Search Engine Pages Results (SERPs) to click another result. A short dwell time signals to Google that the page probably wasn't of sufficient quality to satisfy the original search query. Clock up enough of these short dwell times and your site's pages will slowly make their way down the rankings.
Google's desire to deliver the best search results for its users reminds us that content isn't the only king.
Businesses exist to serve another king: the customer.
Indeed, content is only king because of the customer. Content without consumers is like a party without guests. There's nobody there to drink the beer and eat the sausage rolls.
The solution is simple.
Create content that first and foremost satisfies the wants and needs of your customers.
Then, and only then, should it be tailored to the wants and needs of search engines.
This is where content writing and content creation services come into the picture, along with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).*
It's where Brandwise comes into the picture too because we know that getting more traffic to a website isn't the end of the story. You need to be able to convert that traffic into more business.
That's why when we create content for your business, we make sure it's Bloody Good Content.
To find out how Brandwise can help improve your existing website content as well as create new content that will satisfy the wants and needs of visitors and the search engine gods, let's meet for a coffee (virtual or in person!) and a no-obligation chat. Just fill in the form on our Contact page to get the ball rolling.
Brandwise offers Content Writing and other online marketing services to businesses and organisations in Edinburgh and throughout the Borders including in Galashiels, Hawick, Peebles, Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, Earlston, Coldstream and Eyemouth, as well as Carlisle and Berwick. We also provide content writing to clients elsewhere in the UK.
*Apologies for the outbreak of jargon. SEO's ultimate aim is to get more traffic to your website, but not any old traffic: it has to be targeted traffic. CRO? It's goal is to turn more of those visitors into clients and customers.
Last updated: 9th September 2020
Way back in January, 1996, a certain Bill Gates declared, "Content is king".
This was when the internet was still in its infancy, and a time when the leading tech entrepreneurs of the day were beginning to grasp the endless possibilities that an online world could offer.
The reason Bill Gates thought content was king was because he saw the internet becoming "a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products -a marketplace of content".
And that's exactly what it has become. A marketplace of content.
When it comes to your website and online marketing today, you will hear those three same words over and over again. Content is king!
That's because we go online to find content, whether that be the written word, videos, or images of cats that make us LOL.
So, if you want some of those people to visit your website, you need content.
Then you need to direct them to your content. A visitor to your site might follow a link to it from another web page or a social media post, for example, but the most common way will be by finding you via a Google search.
What's interesting is that Google wasn't even a thing when Bill Gates wrote his Content Is King essay. Google was founded two years later, in 1998, although there were other search engines available at the time, including Lycos and AltaVista, organising content in a searchable way.
The reason Google is now the undisputed king of the search engines is because it delivers the best search results. In fact, Google has become Bill Gates' marketplace of content and it's why content is still king today.
Which also makes Google a kingmaker of sorts.
It can make your website a king or a pauper in terms of the number of visitors it sends to its pages.
If Google's search algorithms determine that your content is better than the content of your competition, you will appear at the top of the search result pages. By ranking well for key search terms, your business will thrive, making it crucial that your web pages contain the quality of content Google is looking to reward.
The customer is king too
Given its ability to make or break a business online, it's not difficult to see why some webmasters create content solely to find favour with Google.
Some content providers and SEO professionals play on this desire by peddling a never mind the quality, feel the width kind of approach. They take the "content is king" mantra and then sell you on the idea that any old content will do as long as there is lots of it. This leads to the production of page after page of poorly crafted content with the sole intention of gaming Google. Things like hundreds of pages of near-duplicate content with the odd word changed here or there. Examples of this are "reworked" content from Wikipedia or what Google calls out as doorway pages.
This type of thin, worthless content can rank for a time, particularly for non-competitive search terms, but it is just as likely to see your website penalised and banished from Google's rankings. And if you want to know how good your SEO people really are, get them to recover you from a Google "manual action" (Google are too polite to use the word, penalty).
Content written for search engines also goes down like a lead balloon with visitors to your website. What's more, the search engines know this. They take into account factors such as dwell time, how long a visitor spends on a page before returning to the Search Engine Pages Results (SERPs) to click another result. A short dwell time signals to Google that the page probably wasn't of sufficient quality to satisfy the original search query. Clock up enough of these short dwell times and your site's pages will slowly make their way down the rankings.
Google's desire to deliver the best search results for its users reminds us that content isn't the only king.
Businesses exist to serve another king: the customer.
Indeed, content is only king because of the customer. Content without consumers is like a party without guests. There's nobody there to drink the beer and eat the sausage rolls.
The solution is simple.
Create content that first and foremost satisfies the wants and needs of your customers.
Then, and only then, should it be tailored to the wants and needs of search engines.
This is where content writing and content creation services come into the picture, along with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).*
It's where Brandwise comes into the picture too because we know that getting more traffic to a website isn't the end of the story. You need to be able to convert that traffic into more business.
That's why when we create content for your business, we make sure it's Bloody Good Content.
To find out how Brandwise can help improve your existing website content as well as create new content that will satisfy the wants and needs of visitors and the search engine gods, let's meet for a coffee (virtual or in person!) and a no-obligation chat. Just fill in the form on our Contact page to get the ball rolling.
Brandwise offers Content Writing and other online marketing services to businesses and organisations in Edinburgh and throughout the Borders including in Galashiels, Hawick, Peebles, Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, Earlston, Coldstream and Eyemouth, as well as Carlisle and Berwick. We also provide content writing to clients elsewhere in the UK.
*Apologies for the outbreak of jargon. SEO's ultimate aim is to get more traffic to your website, but not any old traffic: it has to be targeted traffic. CRO? It's goal is to turn more of those visitors into clients and customers.
Last updated: 9th September 2020
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