Whether you are working on better content development or learning about search engine optimization (SEO) for the first time, it is a crucial part of any online marketing campaign.
The vast majority of internet experiences start with a search engine query. Where you fall in a search for the products or services you provide will dictate how many people come to your website to buy from you or hire you. To make it worth your while, you do need to have your page show up as close to the top as you can because as we’ve noted before most people do not scroll past the first page.
The first area where a content development strategy can help you is in the area of organic search rankings. Experts have reported that a full 95% of website traffic from search engine searches comes from these organic search results. Many websites report that at least 40% of the traffic they see is from organic search engine results. Paid ads on search engines only bring in 5% of traffic. The higher up you are on that search page, the more clicks you will get. The first result in these searches can expect to get more than 48% of traffic from people who initiated the search. That number drops to 9% for the second listing in a search.
Not only does this data show how important it is to be number one in organic search but it also highlights how short people’s attention spans have become. While the algorithms that produce these rankings change all of the time, it is important to note that when people do not see what they want in the first link in search results, they often start looking for something else entirely.
Search engines say they write their algorithms to get people the best search results possible. They want to find websites that offer the consumers what they are really looking for in the shortest amount of time possible. The right content development will both help people find your website and make them want to hang around your site for a while. This is because they will find useful information on your site and that can help turn them from web visitors to clients or customers.
This shows why you should integrate advice from your SEO company into your web design. The goal is not to just sprinkle your content with the right words or phrases and hope more people find you. The best content development plans include drafting interesting content that gives your customers and clients information they need. For example, the internet is filled with cats doing cute stuff but unless your business has something to do with kittens, adding cat related words to your content can backfire.
This is where the real work of content development starts. The content you have on your website needs to be professionally written, contain no typos or grammatical errors, and be relevant to what you do and what your customers or clients need. To keep your website findable by the spiders employed by search engines, you also need to be diligent about updating your content. Old or stale content does nothing to help your business.
Another thing you may want to add to your arsenal is an automated marketing system. Companies who use these report a return on investment of about 800% for every dollar that they invest in the process. This can do a lot to augment your content strategy.
From time to time, so-called experts in internet marketing and web development announce the death of SEO and SEO services companies. The fact of the matter is that as long as people rely so heavily on search engines to help them navigate the web, SEO strategy and good content development will reign supreme as the ways to draw traffic to a website and grow a bottom line.
