Thursday, December 7, 2023
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7 reasons your business website needs more content now

Dominic Lill ,  ,  ,  ,  , 

The perfect website begets more traffic, more enquiries and more sales, right? Not necessarily.

You’ve invested a lot in your website. It’s professionally designed. Now your website just need content.

website content

You seem to have every element you need:

  • Easy navigation.
  • Plenty of great visuals.
  • Product pictures and information.
  • Contact information.
  • Online checkout.

In spite of this, you just aren’t getting the performance you need. Traffic and rankings have gone stagnant. What’s missing?

The missing piece could be content. Yes, you have plenty of content already, but a good website benefits from a steady supply of fresh content. If yours hasn’t been updated in a while, here are some reasons to invest in new content for your SME website. Once you see the results, you’ll want to make a commitment to updating your site with fresh content on a regular basis.

1. Google loves websites that update frequently

If you want plenty of traffic, you need a better ranking. More specifically, you need a better ranking from Google. Yes, there are other search engines, but let’s face facts. Google is the gold standard. More people use it, and most other search engines fall in line when it comes to determining how sites are ranked. Google has made it loud and clear. They favor websites that update frequently.

No, you shouldn’t throw out any content you can, multiple times a day. Updating once a day with great content is amazing. Adding new content two or three times a week is enough for Google to categorize your website as ‘frequently updated’. Google constantly crawls the web in search of new or updated web pages. When it sees your fresh content, it will add that to the Google index. If your new content is high quality, you increase your chances of Google boosting your rankings. Keep doing that, and your chance of ranking higher goes up even more. The more attention you get from Google the better.

Now some even better news. You don’t have to write an entirely new page of web content for this to work. Update an existing page with some new images and captions. Take an older blog post, and add some new information. Add internal links from one page on your website to another. You can even add a page for user-generated content, or a comments section to your blog. User content and feedback also counts as updated content.

2. More content increases your website authority

If you want your audience to see you as something more than the seller of goods or services, you have to share your expertise that engages your audience. By publishing more content, you increase your position as an authority or thought leader in your industry. You become a source of information, not just a place to spend money. When you consider that your customers may be at any stage of the sales funnel at any given time, that’s important. The tire kicker you impress with a series of helpful blog posts will remember you when they are finally ready to make a purchase. In the meantime, they’ll visit regularly. They may even recommend you to their friends.

Here are some examples of authoritative content that increases trust and boosts thought leadership:

  • Interviews and question and answer sessions.
  • Tutorials.
  • Expert roundups.
  • Whitepapers.
  • eBooks.
  • Online courses or webinars.
  • How to videos.
  • News articles.
  • Infographics.

Any content that informs and educates members of your audience can boost your thought leadership and authority.

One way to share great, authoritative content is to start a blog. This gives you a single place to share posts with your thoughts about your industry, to provide expert advice, and otherwise share your expertise. This is also a great way to leverage your reach with industry influencers. If you can entice a reputable blogger or industry leader to write a guest post for you, that increases your content offerings. It also provides you access to an even larger audience. Use research tools like BuzzSumo to find trending topics to write about.

3. Adding website content forces frequent indexing

When you add new content, you don’t guarantee that your pages will rank higher. You do guarantee that search engines will stop by more frequently to index your site. When that happens, you are essentially presenting your site for reconsideration when it comes to determining what you rank for, and how high. New content gives search engines a reason to index your site again. Quality content helps you to earn higher rankings as a result.

Indexing takes several things into consideration. Google ‘bots’ look at the number of inbound links there are to your site, how often you update, the keywords you use, etc. When you update, the search engine rewrites your existing ranking based on that new content, and your existing content.

Update frequently, but keep your standards high. It’s the quality of your content that really matters once you’ve gotten the attention of a search engine spider. Try the following content tools to help you present only the best to your audience.

4. You can rank for more relevant keywords

The keywords that were important to you when you started your business may not be the ones you want to rank for today. If you do keyword research on a regular basis, and you should, you will find new keyword phrases that become relevant to your niche.

You don’t want to keep stuffing keywords into a small content offering. Google and other search engines will penalize you for that. Instead, your best bet is to create new content. Then, use new keyword phrases organically. This will make your content more readable, and ensure that you rank for the most relevant keyword phrases to date.

5. It helps you provide more up to date information to your audience

Ultimately, this is the biggest and best reason for adding more content to your website. You should want to keep your customers informed and up to date. You do this by adding new content to your website on a regular basis. New content is the tool you use to provide up to date information about company events. It’s how you inform your audience about new products.  You can use content to share your values, to demonstrate your products, and to introduce your customer to members of your team. Remember that millennials and members of Gen Z care about the values of the companies they patronize. Share content about what you support to show them your values align with theirs.

Content is also better received when you compare it to traditional advertising. A successful branded content campaign will improve engagement and recall much more than advertising copy ever will. The content you produce for your website is also less expensive than paid, advertising content. You’ll never pay for clicks to content you create and promote on your own.

6. You’ll earn backlinks

When it comes to trust and authority, you can’t do much better than a backlink. When a blogger or copywriter for a reputable site links to content on your website, that’s a major endorsement. Essentially, they are telling their readers that you have something to say that is so trustworthy and important that they should click over to your website just to read it.

Adding content to your website increases the chance of your earning backlinks. Ethan Dunwill content editor at both Supreme Dissertations and Grab My Essay has this to say about backlinks.

“I encourage my writers to avoid linking to content that is more than a year old. Otherwise, they risk relying on outdated material. A site that uses current content is more likely to find their way onto our list of preferred resources.”

It’s also important to mention the SEO benefits of adding content once again. Most people don’t bother with websites that aren’t on the first page of their search results. Bloggers and others may not even see your website if you aren’t ranking high thanks to fresh, new content.

Backlinks don’t just matter to Google. If you want to rank for Bing or other search engines, you can earn better results if you earn backlinks from other sites.

7. It helps you get more website traffic

92% of people visiting your website aren’t there to make a purchase. If you want them to return, and hopefully make a purchase later, your content makes a difference. When it doesn’t appear as if you provide fresh content, on a regular basis, they don’t have any need to come back and explore, do they? Worse, it makes your website look dated and stale.

Use new content to give people a reason to visit your website, even if they aren’t shopping. Make it a place where they can visit to catch up on industry news and information, get advice from the experts, and search for solutions to their problems. Consider adding a blog so that your followers can subscribe, and know that you will be posting frequent updates. Content is a big part of the overall user experience. This keeps potential customers on your pages longer, and ensures they will come back for more.

Final thoughts

Your site needs a regular injection of fresh, new content on a regular basis. New content leads to better SEO and improved search rankings. It boosts your authority with your audience, and increases your thought leadership. By presenting a wide range of content, you attract customers at various stages of the customer journey as well. You’ll have better-informed customers, who are more likely to engage with your brand.