We have many clients come to us who want to be on page one after a website is launched. When I review the site, I see a great looking site, lots of great images, really good navigation, but no significant written content … and this can be a problem in terms of SEO.
Google does not review your site using the human eye; instead, it uses a complex computer algorithm to crawl your site to determine what it’s about and where it should be placed. While an image-intensive site may look great, Google finds it hard to work out the site’s purpose; images on it are mostly black holes in content. Take a look at your site; if you take away the images, can you tell what your site is about? If not, how do you expect Google to?
When working out what content you need, there are some simple rules you should consider when optimising your site’s content…
- Front Page Content – The front page is the gateway to your site and it is imperative you make a great first impression for visitors to the site; the same can be said for Google bots. You have to provide enough content so Google can determine what the site is about, but also not too much that it detracts or hampers the human user’s use of the site.
- Unique Content -All content on your site should be unique to the site. Google aims with its organic search results to provide good relevant search results from a variety of sources; not to simply list the same thing over and over again. Content obviously gets copied and rather than listing all results, Google will aim to list only the most relevant and ignore the rest. What this means is, if you have copied content on your site from other sources, Google will ignore the content affecting your site’s authority overall and thus its ranks.Duplicate content also applies to internal pages. If you have many pages with essentially the same content, Google will simply ignore the extra content as not being relevant, so if you want your whole site to be indexed properly, ensure all content is unique across your site as well.
- Updated Content – Many website owners fall into the trap of “set and forget” when it comes to content. Your content might be great at launch, but if nothing is added to the site it becomes stale and thus could affect ranks. The way Google looks at it, if you do not care about your site why should they?
Content across all pages should be periodically (every 4-6 months) rewritten and freshened to keep the site up to date. In addition to this, you should have a blog or news section updated weekly with unique relevant posts, which not only increases the content available on the site thus increasing authority, but also shows the site is active which Google will notice.
Content of a website is just as important as the design and useability. It is an important factor for Google determining the website purpose and how important it is in relation to it, which obviously affects ranks. At SEOcycle, we employ the best content writers to help our clients’ websites achieve the ranks they desire. Contact us for a website review and advice on how your website can be improved.