It is no secret that in the digital age, having and maintaining a strong online presence is crucial for businesses and organizations, no matter their size. To paraphrase Shakespeare, your website is the window to your company or organization’s soul. As search engines evolved and Google rose to the top (sorry Bing and Ask.com) ensuring your site had the proper content to raise its SEO became as integral a part of a website’s content as User Experience was to functionality.
Digital marketing classes abound with endless modules on the importance of keywords to ensure sites are on the first page of a search. But simply focusing on keywords, meta tags, and LSI keywords is no longer enough to stand out. Here, we will explore why it’s essential to keep website content interesting and engaging, regardless of your audience.
The Problem with Keyword-centric Approaches
While keywords are important for SEO, solely focusing on them can lead to content that feels forced and uninteresting. It is one thing to get someone to visit your site. That, as they say, is half the battle. But one of the key areas of any site’s analytics is bounce rate and how much time users spend on your site. You’ve brought them in, but is your content good enough to keep them there?
According to MetricHQ, an open library for metrics and KPIs, 52 seconds is considered a good amount of time for someone to spend on your site. That is all the time you have to engage your audience. By focusing solely on keywords mixed in with information that is informative but not interesting, your site may have just as high a bounce as it is ranked. Ignoring creativity and interest will ultimately drive users away instead of engaging them.
Understanding User Intent:
User intent is crucial for creating valuable content that resonates with your audience. This refers to the underlying goal or motivation behind a user’s search query. By deciphering these intentions, businesses can tailor their content to meet their audience’s needs and expectations.
Generally, there are three types of user intent: informational, navigational, and transactional. Informational intent sees users seeking information or answers to specific questions. Navigational is when users are looking for a specific website or webpage. Transactional intent is when users are ready to make a purchase or complete a specific action.
Understanding and catering to user intent improves the relevance and usefulness of your content.
For example, a tech school might discover that many users are searching for reviews and reasons why, if they take a program, they’re going to get a job when they’re done. It is easy to spew stats and vague promises, but this can be dry and, let’s be honest, everyone will make their product out to be the best. Too often, the result is boring, and repetitive and offers little more than chest-thumping.
Including aspects that show why prospective students will enjoy their learning experience is just as important as the potential return on investment.
Creating Engaging and Valuable Content:
So what is the best content to have? The TikTok generation would rather watch something than read about it, which is why so many sites are laden with video. This, however, can be a double-edged sword. If your video takes a user off-site to YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, the temptation is there to check out what else is on there and now, they are lost. Producing high-quality, relevant, and valuable content is essential for keeping users engaged but should stay on your pages. Blog articles can have the same effect. While it is important to maintain the legitimacy of your blog topic, linking facts to other sites in your blog to maintain trust takes the reader away. Trust is important but once gone they may not return.
Enhance your storytelling, with interactive elements, and multimedia elements such as infographics can help make content more interesting and memorable and lower your bounce rate.
Balancing SEO with User Experience:
Finding the balance between SEO and user experience can be crucial to the overall success of a website. Once again we’re faced with that double-edged sword. As SEO helps your content rank higher in search engine results pages, focusing solely on SEO can lead to overly optimized and not user-friendly content. On the other hand, prioritizing user experience without considering SEO can result in great content that doesn’t reach its intended audience. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Too often, websites are needlessly stuffing content with keywords instead of focusing on creating high-quality, relevant content that naturally incorporates these keywords. The result is bland and dry content that, while informative, can also be a substitute for sleeping pills. This is especially true when it comes to marketing blogs. Of course, your product is the best. Of course, your program will lead to a job. Can you imagine telling perspective buyers otherwise?
Of course, even the best-written blog or description is useless if your target audience can’t find it. You also need to ensure your website is well-organized and easy to navigate. One reason I took a course in UX/UI design was because I found a lot of websites may look good, but they were not very intuitive. Other factors like page load times, mobile responsiveness, and creating clear and intuitive navigation menus can affect a user’s desire to explore your site. Ensuring these areas are solid will not only improve the user experience but also have a positive impact on SEO, as search engines tend to favour user-friendly websites.
Measuring Success Beyond Keywords:
While keywords are important for SEO, they are not the be-all and end-all as to how well your content is performing. To get a more holistic view, it’s crucial to consider other metrics that reflect user engagement and behaviour.
User Engagement: As stated above, user engagement metrics, such as bounce rate, pages per session, and the average session duration, provide insights into how users are interacting with your content. A high bounce rate may indicate that users are not finding your content relevant or engaging, while a high average session duration suggests that users are spending more time consuming your content.
Time on Page: The amount of time users spend on a page can indicate how engaging and valuable they find the content. Pages with longer average time on page metrics typically indicate that users are spending more time consuming the content, which can be a sign of high-quality, engaging content.
Conversion Rates: Conversion rates measure the percentage of users who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a white paper. By tracking conversion rates, you can gauge how well your content is performing in terms of driving users towards your business goals.
Social Shares and Backlinks: The number of social shares and backlinks your content receives can also be a valuable indicator of its success. Social shares indicate that users find your content valuable enough to share with their network, while backlinks from other websites can improve your SEO and indicate that other sites see your content as authoritative and valuable.
Brand Mentions and Sentiment: This can provide insights into how your content is perceived by your audience. Positive sentiment and many brand mentions may indicate your content is resonating with your audience and helping to build brand awareness and reputation.
By considering these metrics in addition to keyword rankings, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of how well your content is performing and make informed decisions about how to improve it.
Websites are so important to a company’s image that their importance can not be overlooked. But if it comes at the expense of creativity and making a genuine effort to connect with potential users, buyers or students, then you are missing out on a lot of potential business. Your content tells a story, your story and who wouldn’t make their story interesting? Everyone wants to end up on page one of a Google search but if your audience is leaving then you might as well be on page 1 million.
Article by:
Andrew Smith
