A message we seem to be endlessly pushing, is the importance of having fresh content on your website, particularly for SEO. Search engines absolutely love new content. It shows that your website is constantly evolving, and has something new to offer visitors. Something we’d like to discuss this week is why your content needs to be written for people and not just search engines. While it’s one thing to write content for SEO that search engines will love, it’s essential to also keep real people in mind that will be visiting your website when writing content. After all, they’ve made a search for something and clicked on your site, assuming it will provide what they’re looking for. Having thin content that doesn’t actually deliver what they looked for will have them clicking the back button and this will ultimately have a negative impact on your site’s performance.
Here are a few ways in which high-quality user-focused content will benefit your website:
- Bounce rate and time on site These are factors which are not only useful indicators for you (and us!) to measure your website’s performance, but are also used by search engines to determine if they’re displaying the most useful sites for specific queries. For example, a website that has users abandoning it after just a few seconds is an obvious indication that visitors are not finding what they came for, and this will eventually be regarded by search engines as a reason to display other sites with more useful and engaging content at the top of searches.
- Links While the value of incoming links to a website from link building has been a hot topic over the past few years, many experts claim the value of links to be a fraction of what it once was, there’s no doubt there is still definite value in having links pointing to your site, both for people to follow as well as search engines. By having content on your website that is actually useful, and even better, interesting or entertaining, you’re encouraging natural link building, with others doing the work for you! People like to share things, especially things that are useful or funny. They might post a link on their own blog or website, or simply paste a link to your site on their Facebook page. Where ever they post it, you’re gaining potential exposure to potential visitors, while also sending signals to search engines that you have something so great on your website, people actually want to share it and send their friends there!
So there you have it! These are just some of the reasons why fresh, user-focused content is a must have for websites that want to succeed in SEO results and grow their traffic.
