What is Content?

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Content is the substance of your website and public communications.

Well written and interesting content is the key to engagement with your customers. This is where you can share your expertise, experience, business ethos, sustainable credentials and even your sense of humour.

Content can be represented in the form of information, education, a story or anecdote, a quiz, a competition, a vlog or an infographic.  And you can share your content in a variety of media; on your website, blog, newsletter, social media or in guest blogs or Youtube.  

Creating regular content of consistent quality will promote brand loyalty.  If your clients or customers trust what you have to say, they are more likely to pick you as their favoured supplier.

Fresh Content

Ensure your website and social media are kept uptodate with regular new content – Google knows if you’re keeping your website uptodate and adding new and exciting information regularly.  

Create a manageable schedule for yourself, ‘regular’ doesn’t need to be every day, and you don’t need to write an essay every week.   

If you’ve got enough resources, you can tailor your content to the different users for each channel (trade, clients, media).   If not, pick the channels your clients are most likely to use and focus on those. 

If you have limited resources, keep track of ideas as they come to you, and when you feel inspired, build up a few content ideas and blogs you can then use over time.

Befriend your Blog

Our first tip would be to be-friend your blog.  This is where you can really engage your customers with attractive, on-topic information.

Your blog, along with your social media presence, is your opportunity to personalise your website with more information about you and your business. 

Newsletters bring a great return on investment.  Reaching out to those already interested enough in your business to sign up for a newsletter is a great way to make sales. 

Targeting your content

Always bear in mind the different types of audience your content needs to reach. You need a variety of content information for beginners through to experts. 

To you, what you do and how you do it is obvious.  Try to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes, outside the company, possibly outside the industry and imagine what your potential customer might ask their search engine. 

  1. Enquiry: Imagine the complete stranger coming to investigate your business sector for the first time – answer the questions they may have about engaging with your industry, why having this product in their life is necessary, and what issues it resolves. 
  2. Research: The customer is now convinced they want a product like yours. You need to provide more in-depth information about what your product can do, prove your expertise and why you’re the best supplier. 
  3. Transaction: cement your relationship with the client by providing excellent customer service, how to use your product, after-sales service, suggestions for use and very importantly, include links to your contact and shop pages.

Keywords

It always comes back to keywords with SEO. Keywords are the words or phrases used by prospective clients to find an answer, product or service.  You need to work the relevant keywords or keyphrases into your content, so it answers your clients’ queries.

Remember to go back to basics. 

  • Following the above stages of client searches, a brand new customer to your industry might be asking really simple, obvious (to you) questions – answer them. 
  • For the already interested customer, you might want to provide more educational, specific how-to information.
  • And for those looking to make a transaction, prove your expertise. You can use industry-specific language, explain which particular product is suitable for their needs.

Try to engage with your reader by writing at a level they will understand. Don’t overuse the keywords (keyword stuffing).  Using the same words repeatedly makes for very odd reading and will feel like a computer wrote your text. 

Headers

Remember to signpost your content; using paragraph headers properly helps the reader find the part of the article they’re looking for.  Work your chosen keywords into the headers too.

Bullets and Numbering your content

Breaking up your content makes it more interesting for your audience, and the search engines recognise this.

Whilst it may seem contrary to potentially lose your audience to another website, don’t be afraid to include relevant links to other websites or industry bodies within your content. 

Believe it or not, the search engines rate this.  You are improving the quality of experience for your reader, and if it increases their trust in you, you are that step closer to a conversion or sale.