A generation of business owners and managers still think their websites are merely visiting cards. One of their “go-to” expressions will be: “our clients/audience already know where to find us…” This premise may be true, but optimizing your website, using SEO techniques, and providing good-quality content will help you to reach new clients and audiences.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Optimizing a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity will make the website pages more easily findable and relevant. Consequently, search engines will rank them more highly, helping to promote your website and your products to new clients.
SEO best practices benefit the user search experience and the page’s ranking by featuring good-quality content that fulfils user search needs. Good SEO includes using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines, featuring descriptive URLs containing relevant keywords, and schema markup that specifies the page’s content.
Paid clicks
Google, Bing and just about every social platform will be happy to take your money for paid ads. But ask yourself? How often do you personally click on these ads? And even when you do, will you buy anything? How long do you stay on the site to which these ads lead you?
Our experience tells us that paid search campaigns can improve product or brand awareness. They can be essential for Business to Consumer (B2C) websites, where multiple websites compete for the same customers. For Business to Business (B2B) websites, they are of less importance, as projects and services are rarely purchased directly online.
At best, bringing more visitors to your website will generate more leads. However, many visitors attracted by ads will stay on your website for only a few seconds unless they see good-quality content that appeals to them.
Organic traffic
Organic search refers to search results without paid advertisements. Instead, search engines such as Google or Bing rank organic search results according to the relevance of a website to the search terms used. Creating good-quality content and using SEO techniques and tools such as Yoast to help you improve your metadata will help to make your website more attractive to search engines.
The value of good-quality content
Good-quality content, with compelling stories, videos, white papers and explainers, is key to stimulating the interest of visitors arriving on your website. And you need to keep this up, week in, week out, if you want your organic traffic to grow.
We’ve achieved some dramatic results using these methods. For example, one client, an international software developer with high-value niche software products, asked us to design and develop a new Corporate website. We also helped their marketing director produce good-quality content, publishing new content at least once per week.
Comparing their website visitors in January 2021 with their October figures in the same year, the number of users increased by 455,61%. And the number of new users increased by 559,51%. These potential customers found the site via Google/Bing search without paid ads.
How do we know the role of good-quality content?
That is a good question. The above graphic shows the impact of good-quality content and a highly-tuned website. But what happens when you stop publishing content regularly? Unfortunately, we’ve seen the effect for ourselves. After the marketing director left our client, their management decided that “their website” wasn’t essential to their business. Their CFO used the exact phrase with which we introduced this article.
“Our clients/audience already know where to find us…”
Against all advice, they reduced the budget for new content and more or less stopped the technical maintenance of their site. The results have been dramatic. Organic traffic to their website has decreased by over 75% in less than six months.
Summary
I think these figures show how good-quality content and good SEO can grow your traffic, increasing organic traffic and bringing you new, potential clients. In business-to-business marketing, this will increase your commercial opportunities. However, they also demonstrate what can happen when you stop paying attention to your content. As website developers, our focus is on building good-quality, responsive websites – which will help improve your performance with Google. So if you’re looking for a new website, please get in touch. However, even the best website needs good-quality content and a regular publishing schedule to achieve the very best results for your site.
