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Why is content important to your website?

A lot of the time when a business opts for a new website, they conduct a lot of research about the design and features they want on the website, however, more often than not, content is forgotten about until the development stage of the website, hence the reason why some websites take longer than usual to get to the completion stage.

Looking at the content side of your online presence, content creates brand alertness about your products or services and should not be forgotten about until the development stage of your site, as it’s one of the most important aspects, since it gives Google a reason to display your website.

If your content isn’t up to speed, then this is going to affect your business rapidly, since search engines like Google rely on your content to display your website in search results. This is often the reason why some websites don’t show up in search results.

In saying this, it’s important that your content contains specific keywords people may search to get to your website. If you have a blog on your website, it’s important to keep it up to date with fresh content related to your industry, so that your site will appear when these keywords are searched by someone who may looking up keywords to access your website.

In terms of content creation, it is important to ensure that you know your audience, so you can branch out to potential clients or customers.

For example, if you are running a hair dressing salon, you want to make sure you don’t have too many pages on your website which are very wordy, as your audience aren’t visiting your website to sift through pages and pages of content looking for your booking tool, prices or your gallery. Knowing your audience for this type of business, your viewers will be visiting your site to look at your gallery, prices and book a haircut in, so be sure to have your booking tool a click away from every page and that your site features a gallery and your address in the header of your website.

Whereas, if you are running a legal firm, your content should be extremely professional and rich, generally containing pages for each legal service you offer, so that your audience can navigate through your services, locating the information on the particular legal service they are looking for.

If you need a bit of help deciding on a content strategy for your website, a good idea is to scope out your audience with your website developer and put together a sitemap during the quoting process, so you know what content you have to work on during the development process. This will allow you plenty of time to draft your content together before launch day.

Quite often, companies also commonly include a video on their website. Content can be in video form, but when doing this, it’s good to include videos you have filmed or had filmed for the company yourself. That way they have been uploaded to your own channel on YouTube or the video platform you have used, increasing awareness about your business across additional social media platforms.

If you also hand out brochures on the services that your company offers as well, be sure to include slightly different content or more content on your website about your services than what is on the brochure. Brochures and pamphlets are a window to your website and usually potential clients or customers visits your website to find out more information about your company.

If you already have an established website and aren’t sure what content needs additional work, a very handy tool which may help you create content or work on content for your website is Google Analytics. This is a free service offered by Google that you can sign up for with a Google account. Once you have signed up and registered, you will get a snippet of tracking code that will need to be placed onto your website by your website developer. Once it has been placed onto your site, Google Analytics will track clicks individually on your website, which will give you an idea what your viewers are interested in.

Google Analytics is particularly handy if you have a blog on your website and aren’t sure what content to fill it with. It will also give you an insight into what product and services pages on your website aren’t getting the clicks they should be, so that you can improve on those pages.