Monday, January 21, 2013
Content is the driving force to not only showing up well in the search results, but also to convert those who land on your website. With a strategy of adding new original content and refreshing outdated content, you can keep your website relevant for the search engines and engaging for your audience.
Why Content is Important
Content is the best way for the search engines to scan a website and deem if it is relevant for a given search inquiry. The content is crawled by the search engines to see if it is relevant and fresh. Keeping your content up-to-date and pertinent indicates to the search engines that the site is being maintained and continuing to provide the most accurate information available.
The Importance of Original Content
The only way to create fresh content is to have new, original content written for the services you are providing. Duplicate content has no added value to a website and the only person who will get any value from that content is the original author. Most optimizers recommend that a business adds 20-30% of new content every year to its website.
Not only does content have to be original, but it must be engaging as well. Each page is indexed separately by the search engines and has the possibility to be the first page seen on your website. With an industry average for dentists of only 2 minutes on a website and an average of 2.8 pages viewed per visit, you have to make an impression with the content you post on your website. Think of your audience. Keep a balance between writing for the search engines and writing compelling content that will set you apart from your competition and drive your audience toward contacting your practice.
Writing for the Internet
Your website is not a book. Your audience will not read it as a book. Keep your paragraphs short and use sub-headings such as H2s and H3s. People are searching the internet with purpose and often know what they are looking for before they find your site. They will browse your page until they find what they are looking for. It doesn’t matter if you have what they are looking for if it is buried and they cannot find it. Sub-headings will help your audience find what they are searching for quickly and also indicate the most important points of the page to the search engines.
You have added your page for a purpose; now tell your audience what you want them to do. Internet users by nature are passive and should be told what their next step should be. If you have just informed them about the benefits of replacing their old fillings, send them to your contact form and tell them that you are the doctor for the job.
Adding New Content with a Strategy
Plan out the new content that you would like to add and be consistent. Think about the tortoise and the hare. If you add a lot of content one month and none for the next year, the search engines will notice that inconsistency. Add pages relevant and supporting of the content currently residing on your website and link to those correlating pages. Use blogs to identify more timely updates such as new technologies or very specific topics. Blogs are great to optimize for long-tale or phrase-based search inquiries such as Q&A scenarios.
Be sure to utilize your websites tools. Many websites and blogs have built-in tools which allow you to publish your new content on a certain date, allowing the author to write batches of content and publish that content in the future.
Keeping your Old Content Fresh
Pages gain equity over time after they have been posted. They can also lose equity if the “freshness” of that content is not maintained. Some pages will need more maintenance than others. A page such as the history of dentistry may never need to be updated, unless history is re-written, then it will most likely stay relevant. Other pages such as “Dental Technologies” will constantly be changing with new developments and must be updated to keep the content fresh and relevant.
One way search engines track the relevance of a page is by how the audience is engaging with the page. Fewer visits and less time on a page indicates a lack of relevance. Keep an eye on your website’s Google Analytics for indicators such as bounce rate and time on site to identify pages that could use updating. Keep in mind that the page you are writing or re-writing may be the only page your audience will see, so quality over quantity should be your mantra. If the page indexes well but cannot convert your audience into a new patient, it is not doing its job.
Take-Aways
- Think smarter not harder when adding new content and re-writing your pages needing improvement – quality is key to success.
- Be the tortoise – keep consistent with the updates to your website and ensure that all of your pages are relevant to today’s standards.
- Use Google Analytics – gain insight by watching how people are responding to your content and use that to help you build stronger content that converts better.
- Think of your audience – write to your audience and make your content engaging and interesting.
- Use Calls-to-Action – at the end of the page, encourage your audience to take the next steps and follow through with their new-found information.