What is it?

Content is king online. Without content, there is no way for search engines to rank you. We call this the Google Food effect. Content = “Google Food”. Great content is without a doubt one of the most important steps in creating a website that will draw traffic. Content shows you that you know what you’re doing – a critical step in gaining the confidence of your potential customers.

How do you use Content Building? (The Application)

Consider your customer, for a moment. Let’s say your in front of your future customer, and they know nothing about your product.

They need serious convincing to buy your product, and won’t buy it until they are completely satisfied that you have the right product, all the answers, (and let’s not forget a great customer service department).

So, what would you tell them? You would have to pull out all the stops to make sure they are absolutely convinced that you’re the business to work with.

Now, let’s say you’re no longer there at the table, selling your customer. Instead you have been replaced with a computer screen, and they are looking at your website. Your website is your sales tool.

That means that every question a customer might have, that you have ever personally heard as an objection to buying from you must be alleviated.

Every topic of interest that might be peripheral to selling must be there too. This is talked about more below in the Example section.

Why it’s so important (The Result).

There are many reasons that content building one of the most important steps in promoting your website and generating sales.

• Content allows websites to be ranked in search engines.
• Content engages the customer and keeps them reading.
• Content sells customers and compares your product with competitors favorably.
• Content builds confidence in you as a business.
• New, consistent content gives the customer a reason to come back.

Example: hiking boots.

Every topic of interest that might be peripheral to selling should be considered. Not only should you talk about how your product compares vs. your competitors, but you should also make it easy for customer to make an educated decision.

Let’s say you sell hiking boots.

Now, hiking boots are a very personal decision (they attach to your body), an important decision (they could cause foot problems if not chosen carefully), a social decision (they are a reflection of personal style), an infrequent decision (they’re not bought every week or month), and an expensive decision (it’s usually not under $50, and the quality of the hiking boot matters to overall performance.)

Now, everyone that hikes wants to find the perfect book for them. How will they do that? They’ll look online for answers.

Let’s say you create an article called “What Hiking Shoe is Right for You?”. This article alone will drive a specific type of traffic.

It might not be a great deal of traffic, but people who read this article will be very motivated to buy, and voila! They’re on your site already.

What’s more, you can place your boots directly into the article, each boot for a specific purpose outlined in the article. Of course, they are hyperlinks that go to the specific product pages. And that means more sales.

But it doesn’t mean only sales. You can track the information through analytics, and that means you gain valuable information about your buyer, information that you can use in the future to write more articles, and the process begins again.

Pitfalls of content building.

There are virtually no pitfalls of content building. However, one should distinguish between helpful content and pushy selling or irrelevant content.

• If you have content that’s valuable to your customers, those customers are more inclined to buy. However, push too far with sales-speak and you might turn your customer off.
• Also, content that is not on topic is a waste to your efforts. An article might bring in traffic, but if it’s not useful for your customer in purchasing your product, it’s questionable for inclusion. This is a gray area, because sometimes there’s something that a customer might read that they enjoy that buys you goodwill in the business/customer relationship. But always think in terms of selling your goods in terms of prioritizing the articles you do write.

What strategies content building is used for.

• Helps you get noticed: More quality pages, more rankings. Focusing too closely on a small set of keywords will not bring in all the traffic that might buy. If your website has rich, quality content, there are many places you will pop up online. Also, the more content you have, the more you will be linked to, and that means traffic.
• Helps make your website sticky: Text is ‘Google Food’ to search engines; they can’t rank you if you have little content. Make sure you lots of pages, and good content on the pages.
• Helps you build trust: Make it easy to find relevant information that builds trust. What are your fears when browsing? Much of this in intuitive, but some is not. Focus on things like contact information, personal pictures, bios, address, easily found phone number, certifications, SSL logos (if you have an e-commerce website), and removing outdated content – nothing makes confidence in a company than old information on a website.
• Helps you generate sales / leads: Without content, how can you compare anything? Building great content, the content that customers need to see to make a critical decision like purchasing your product, is imperative. You have to tell your customers why they should buy something. Comparison charts between your product and competitor products are particularly helpful here.
• Helps you build referrals: More pages, more referrals. Creating pages, like this page you’re reading, allows more topics of interest to be ranked by search engines, more information to spread around social sites, and a greater likelyhood of being picked up and referred (or ‘liked’, or ‘thumbed up’, or ‘Dugg’, etc.) This differs from creative writing as this refers to quantitative amount, rather than qualitative message.

How we help.

ThinkAroundCorners has been building rich content for over 9 years. We excel in discovering not only how humans read, but also how search engine robots digest information and display it.

Remember, content is king! Content is Google Food! We can help you create the content that is most important to your customers, and market that information so they can find it.