The art of content writing and doing this well is often misunderstood by many website owners and designers. It is commonly known that without content, the ‘meat and potatoes’ of any well performing internet property, a site may just as well be a fancy wallpaper design.
Without good quality, well-researched, interesting and unique content writing many sites will sadly fall by the wayside. They will fail to engage visitors and attract repeat visits and subsequently will perform poorly within search engine rankings. Site bounce rates will soar and a site’s worth will ultimately decline.
What are the main issues for site designers and web property owners?
So, if content is key, why is it that so often this main ingredient of website success is often neglected from the recipe?
In our experience this often comes down to one of the following:
1. A lack of time or interest from website owners in creating quality-led, consistently successful and original content.
This is one of the main reasons that site developers turn to a content professional. After all, when you need a haircut you visit the barber, when experiencing a toothache a visit to the dentist is necessary, for your health the GP is called upon.
Your website’s health is just as important and a professional content service can give you both the expertise and results that is needed to safeguard the wellbeing of any internet property and make it profitable and rank well within the search engines.
2. A lack of ability in actually writing content or lack of knowledge in a particular subject.
Okay, let’s face it you don’t need to be a budding Shakespeare to be able to write interesting and profitable content, but it does help if you can spell accurately, use correct grammar and phrasing and be able to convey the message or ‘call to action’ you wish in the style that is required.
Without some or all of these abilities content writing sadly will not often pass muster.
3. Site owners are already using poorly-written and low quality content that has been sourced from low cost writers, often based overseas and with little or no grasp on how to write for a UK or English speaking audience.
Content writing services that don’t care about your site often produce poorly written, overly keyword-stuffed articles and copy. They have little interest in how your site performs and indeed if it is penalised because of their work. The days of being able to place exaggerated amounts of keywords and key phrases within under-average text to achieve prominent results are now way behind us. This can and often does produce negative ‘SEO’ (search engine optimisation) results.
Whilst passion and a good knowledge of any subject material is always a great starting point for any well written and delivered content, unless you carefully mix the ingredients mentioned then even with the best intentions, your content will not be as successful as you had hoped.
SERPS – Your content will have a direct impact on your search engine results
You may have heard of the term ‘SERPS’ which quite simply stands for ‘Search Engine Results Page’ which is often what can make or break any website. For if we introduce poorly written, low value and overly keyword-stuffed content into any site, our ‘SERPS’ will probably not return preferable page 1 listings within Google, Yahoo, Bing or any of the other major search services available. If a site fails to show up within the first 10 pages of any search engine result for the desired terms, then it may as well be invisible.
The internet is awash with news concerning one of the most well-known Search Engines – Google. With almost constant and evolving updates from Google Panda, Google Penguin and other such colourfully named developments, many sites have found themselves plummeting down the search engine rankings.
In many cases even some of the previously most successful sites have dropped off from Google results altogether. Poorly composed content is one of the main reasons for this negative hit to many sites large or small – so, we ask why allow this to happen in the first place? Pay attention to your content from Day 1 and your content will look after you in return.
The one and only main constant in all of the Google rumblings and (re)adjustments has been that good content always wins. Excellent content writing always puts any site head and shoulders above their badly written counterparts.
Would you purchase an expensive sports car and run it using vegetable oil?
No, you wouldn’t, unless of course you have some kind of fancy hybrid sports machine or are quite mad! We like to use this example to illustrate an important point.
Yes, you may have a premium, generic domain name that is worth thousands of pounds and commands a high value because of the service or niche it exists in or ‘exact match domain’ (EMD) worth. But, however great your domain is, if you fill it with inferior content (the ‘vegetable oil’) your site (the sports car) will break down and it will lose value which might possibly never be recouped.
You get what you pay for
Whilst this is commonly applicable to many areas of life and the services and products we purchase on a daily basis, the same is true for excellent content writing.
After acquiring the domain name of your dreams, it is quite absurd that anyone could even consider using an outsourced content writer who charges a low fee (for instance 0.5p a word) as surely there will be a catch. That catch will be poorly written, useless, badly formed and unusable content.
That’s not to say either that in order to acquire a high level of content quality one needs to spend 20 (or more) pence a word, but always bear in mind in this case that cheapest isn’t necessarily the best.
So remember, nurture and safeguard your content writing within any site whether you’re a major player or a growing concern. Add fresh, unique and well written content (copy) not only initially, but on a regular basis.
In return your site is more likely to yield what is required plus the profitability sought. You will have taken the most important steps to ensure website growth, health and stability in this ever changing world full of developing search engine algorithms.
