SEO Content. Does your website have enough content for it to rank highly in search engine results?
So many new clients come to our SEO company in Sydney for help to achieve Page 1 rankings on Google. This may be as soon as their new website is launched, or to increase the visibility of their existing site.
What a lot of people don’t understand, however, is the importance of content when it comes to SEO.
At SEOcycle, we review so many websites; some of them look fantastic, with plenty of high-quality images, efficient navigation, great site loading speeds and mobile optimisation … but no significant written content.
While all of the aforementioned features are very important for SEO and user experience, a lack of written content on your website can be a major issue if you wish to rank well in SERPs (search engine results pages).
Why Does Written Content Matter So Much?
Google does not review your website using the human eye. Rather, it uses a complex computer algorithm. This algorithm is constantly changing and it is very convoluted, but the way it works can be explained in simple terms.
The algorithm crawls your site to understand what it’s about and where it should be placed in search engine results pages. An image-intensive website may look fantastic and appeal to human users, however, Google finds it difficult to assess the site’s purpose with images alone. In terms of content, images often represent black holes as far as the search engines and the bots they use are concerned.
Consider this: look at your website. If you remove all of the images, can you clearly understand what your site is about?
If the answer to this is “no”, how do you expect the Google algorithm to do it?
You need quality written content on every landing page of your website.
Content 101
Home Page
The home page of your website is akin to a traditional store display window. It is the literal gateway to your website.
Your Home Page must:
- Make a fantastic first impression for human visitors
- Captivate, inform, and engage a human audience
- Capture the attention of Google bots
- Provide relevant information to enable Google to identify the purpose of the website, but without overwhelming the human audience or detracting from the appeal of the site.
Focus keywords are imperative and must be incorporated into the content of the home page and relevant landing pages. They should represent around 1-2% at most of each page’s content; more than that, and Google will negatively flag the page for keyword “stuffing”.
The ideal home page will include at least 350 words of high-value, quality written content. More is good, but keep in mind that too much text will potentially overwhelm the human audience.
Landing Pages should be created to represent all focus keywords and link directly from the home page, as well as directly back to it. Like the home page, around 350 words of written content is recommended for each.
Home and landing pages also require a relevant Meta Title, Meta Description, and a single H1 Tag. Meta titles can not be more than 60 characters and meta descriptions must be fewer than 150-160 characters. They, and the H1 tag, must incorporate relevant focus keywords. All images and other visual content on the site also require ALT Title tags.
Content MUST be 100% Original. All content on your site should be 100% unique to the site. Organic search results aim to provide relevant results from a variety of sources, rather than simply listing the same thing over and over again. Google’s goal is to list only the most relevant results and ignore others; if your site features content copied from other sources, Google will recognise this and ignore that content. This in turn negatively impacts your site’s authority and its ranks.
Duplicate content also applies to internal pages on your site, even if the content you are duplicating is your own. What this means is that if you have several pages with the same content, the search engine will simply ignore the extra content. It will be flagged as irrelevant; your landing pages will be useless at best, and detrimental at worst.
For your entire website to be properly indexed and to rank as highly as possible, make sure that all of your content is unique across your site. (This can be challenging, but it is possible, where applicable, to say essentially the same thing in many different ways – which Google will then recognise as being unique.)
Content Must Be Dynamic to achieve and retain high-ranking search engine results. It can be very easy for website owners and managers to “set and forget” when it comes to their website content. This is a damaging error to make. While your content might be fantastic at the outset, if it is not demonstrably dynamic, Google will consider the entire site to be static. If you don’t care to update your content, why would Google bother ranking it?
This presents a challenge – but it does not need to. While it can be very beneficial to revamp or redesign your entire website every 3-5 years or if you rebrand, you do need to provide dynamic content on an ongoing basis for your site to perform well in terms of search engine ranks.
- Refresh your written content at least every 6 months. Small changes can be very powerful.
- If you feature products, add them to your catalogue on an ongoing basis.
- Incorporate an onsite blog or news section. Update it regularly (once per month at a minimum; fortnightly or weekly is ideal) with original, relevant, interesting, or informative posts. Blog articles should be at least 350 words apiece and include a relevant target keyword.
Call SEOcycle for Help
As a top provider of affordable SEO and website design, SEOcycle understands the complexities of the Google algorithm and what it takes to rank highly in search engine results – and to stay there. We have professional, experienced SEO content writers and ghost bloggers and we have helped hundreds of our clients’ websites achieve the ranks they desire – as well as providing the high-quality content their customers deserve.
Contact us for a website review and advice on how your website can be improved through search engine optimisation and content creation.Email admin@seocycle.com.auor call our Sydney office on (02) 9481 7065
