Let’s face it. Even after 10 years, content is still king when it comes to a website’s success. A site with thin and irrelevant content won’t last too long beside competitors that can offer visitors more in terms of quality and even quantity.
It is just like choosing between two restaurants serving the same kind of food, with one serving more than the other in terms of flavor and quantity, but with both costing you approximately the same when the bill arrives. Which would you choose? This analogy shows you just how important your content is, quality and quantity-wise, to the success of your site.
What Content Should You Create?
In the past, for a site to be even discovered by people who need what you have, you created content that was stuffed with keywords. This was in order for it to be indexed and considered an authority in your niche by search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). Even while the content sounded like it was written by a robot (it was actually written by humans who hated keyword stuffing, hahaha), it was effective at doing its job in those days, and that is to get the site indexed and ranked for people to easily find.
Fast forward to today, and content has become more attuned to human sensibilities rather than to those of bots. You can now see content that is a pleasure to read rather than walls of text with the same word repeated over and over again (it was the norm in the old days of SEO to have a keyword density of 20%, which was irritating, to say the least). Any target keyword that the site is aiming to rank for needs to only be mentioned two to three times in the entire page, with the content having upwards of 700 words in it.
Also, these days, when you say content, we are not talking about articles, blogs, and news posts only. Anything that you put on your site can be considered content. So these include infographics, images, videos, ads, and even quizzes or questionnaires that appear on your site. What you put on your site will depend on what your visitors will expect from you and what you want them to get from you.
How to Use Your Content to Make Your Site an Authority for Your Niche
One of the biggest reasons why you make content for your site is to get people to come and visit your site in the hopes that they buy something from you. The content is essentially “bait” in this scenario. If and when people find that what you are saying resonates with them, and they see your site as an authority in what you are selling, they are more than likely to buy from you and even recommend you to others.
This is why the quality and type of content you create and post on your pages is important. How do you ensure that you do post quality content on your site? Here are some tips that may be helpful:
- Make your content compelling and engaging – When we say compelling, we mean that these should compel people to finish reading and to engage in a positive action after they have read it. Engaging content helps keep people from stopping in the middle of your content and leaving your site. Both are essential to getting your message and your site’s purpose across.
- Create a variety of content types – You don’t have to post articles every day of every week of every month of every year to make people realize that your site is worth visiting. You can mix it up and space it to prevent oversaturation and redundancy. Post a blog today, an article the day after tomorrow, and an infographic over the weekend to show your visitors that you have a lot to offer them in terms of interesting stuff to check out regularly.
- Concentrate on adding value instead of just posting regularly – While it is important for you to offer your visitors regular content, posting just for the sake of posting should not be your norm. When you do have a schedule for posting, make sure that you inject value into each post to ensure that your visitors always have a take-away after every visit to your site.
If you want to create valuable, engaging, and quality content for your site but don’t really have the chops for it (hey, not everyone can be a writer, artist, and entrepreneur at the same time, but there are a few lucky individuals who are), you will do well to hire people to help you with these. Find a writer who can write in the voice that you want your site to have. Get yourself a graphic artist who can translate your ideas into the images that you envision your site as having.
At the end of the day, it is about getting your site the best possible content that it can have, regardless of whether you were the one who created it or not. It is about giving your audience valuable takeaways that will have them see your site as worth their time, and worth the time of others.
