7 Good reasons you might want more content for your website.
Your homepage has lots of backlinks, but few words on it.
(You’re loosing out on your most powerful page. It’s really hard to rank for phrases that don’t appear on the page.)
You’ve got 50,000 pages, but only 100 have more than 50 words on them .
(You’re risking going supplemental, if you haven’t already).
You’ve got the same content on your pages as 50 other sites have.
(Google will try to choose the 1 page it thinks is the "real" one, will it be yours? or will yours go supplemental?)
You’ve got hundreds or thousands of product pages that only have a small description.
(It’s hard enough to keep these from going supplemental, let alone rank for anything (with little content)).
There’s nothing on your site that’s "link worthy" from your peers, or from anyone else.
(Having quality researched content can garner you natural backlinks (gets you backlinks w/o asking for them).
You’ve been targeting 3-4 "big phrases", but have been ingoring all the other phrases.
(Having content pages covering lots of 3 and 4 word keyword phrases helps pick up related long tail phrases. Also, focusing only on a few "major phrases" isn’t good "insurance", and is getting harder).
Google tries to rank "resource pages" high, and "resource pages" tend to have lots of original content.
(Agree?)
Any other reasons you feel people might need more content for their website?
PS – I’ll be out Friday – Monday (going to see my Grandmother in Florida with Mary and Sam).
Stay tuned for the new WeBuildPages.com coming out next week.
18 Responses
Thanks for the great tip Jim.
I give this advice to all of my customers but I have a hard time getting them to practice this. A list like this is a good way to give them extra incentive to add to their content.
Good luck on the new content building service!
Spencer
Jim,
Your whole premise about going supplemental seems to be Google-centric, which is good advice as Google generates the most traffic.
However, it’s very possible to make a nice chunk of change exploiting MSN and Yahoo which seem to be a bit easier to manipulate.
Still good advice.
BTW, what I tell a lot of people is to try to figure out ways to make employees and customers generate content, like reviews on products, etc. , which always keeps fresh and expanding content on the site.
Another reason to create new content… is continuous, new fresh content is one way to get the bots to keep visiting your site, index your content quicker, and just maybe your PR will increase.
Nice call Shimon!…that should be #8.
Jim How about so people will come back to the site to view your excellent valuable information.
Set up a weekly addition of content and let people know about it. Build a how to section on the site and add a new article weekly, the bots and the people will return.
Perhaps even set up a table of contents with the release date of each topic listed.
In my opinion this is a big part in establishing a company and the site as an authority in the field.
Steve
Jim, how about adding content because your prospects can learn from you and ultimately buy? We focus so much on SEO, that we forget who the customer is. 🙂
I like your list though.
Igor yes,
Lets face it you can give people 100% of the information to have a very awesome site, 95% of them will not follow through due to time constraints or laziness. Show people how difficult the given task is and most will say dam I better hire someone to do this. The logical choice will be the person they learned from.
You give 1 you get 10 in return, this is marketing 101 and morality 101.
Perhaps WBP could set up a how to seo section? I would bet that you get lots of high quality PRE educated leads, which in turn will lessen the lightswitch customers looking for a “magic bullet” that is only earned through hard work.
Well certainly yes.. Jim…
As google is known to look for fresh content in a way so that it could be satisfied that is really that site worth my notice??
Once it gets it answer (the fresh content regularly then it comes to you back and back real quick) and once it starts loving you then yeah… you are unbeatable…
Well one more thing… i m also SAM…
Really useful information, thankyou Jim.
but the important thing to remember, even though its good adding content, it needs to be done regularly to keep it fresh. Search Engines pay a great deal of attention to when your website was last updated, and favour the freshest information !
Content sells and the se’s love it! There are still too many “salesy” sites that do the hard sell, instead of offer valuable content and in return build more credibility and ultimately sales.
Good content also gets spread all over the net for high backlinks and additional traffic.
great advice, and equally great comments! =) you know how it is sometimes, when carry several ideas in your heads, do’s and don’ts, and it’s all jumbled?… thanks jim for putting it all together so nicely. real helpful!
it’s all a balance of useful content, seo, and marketing.
Thank you, Jim for taking the time to write that down. We were nodding our heads!
I also agree with the comments here that it can be difficult to get this point across to clients, even when you show them actual results from other content you’ve advised folks to write, or from content you’ve written yourself.
We try to make them understand that THEY are the authority on their shoe/plumbing/gopher removal service and that if they just think about it, they probably have lots to say about the specifics of their products and services, but I repeatedly notice a hesitancy in many very smart people who simply seem uncomfortable with the written word.
We end up having to take on a lot of the content writing ourselves (which I suppose is nice, in one way), but on the other hand, we really do believe that the business owner ought to speak up…loud and long about what they are doing.
Thanks again, Jim!
Thank you, Jim for taking the time to write that down. We were nodding our heads!
Precisely.
Pretty much everyone can do with adding content, is the conclusion.
“Google tries to rank “resource pages” high, and “resource pages” tend to have lots of original content.”
Totally agree + resources page should have quality content. Many of the resources site owners look for content at low prices and writers spin some already used content, that also deploys the essence of resources sites.
My Site has lots of that going on. I have a real estate site with many auto generated pages from property descriptions. I want to know if it’s bad to have the meta description the same as the content description of the page for that property.
I know I have about 9/10 of my pages in the supplemental index.
Thanks for the straight goods on the art of linking and getting great quality backlinks. You’ve been a great source of info and love the quality resources I find along the way here.
Cheers!
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