Think about the hundreds of millions of web sites out there all competing for a slice of recognition in order to obtain another customer or attract a loyal readership. Where does your business fit in? What components of your eCommerce strategy will help you gain traction on an endless sea of web competitors? There are a lot of SEO tactics that can and should be adopted to acquire more traffic and improve page ranking, and indeed, many of them are vital to a site’s durability given the sheer amount of competition. But look around a bit and you’ll really see a pointed emphasis on content creation and the powerful impact it has on the relevance of a site.
A pliable optimization strategy that includes well-written content can help ensure people make it to the information you’ve published on your site. But once those people arrive will they be engaged, or will they leave because they don’t feel captivated by what they’ve found? If a well-built enterprise eCommerce site is the hook, smart and relevant content is the bait. Plainly stated, good writing paired with relevant information is the flagship of beneficial content as it relates to an SEO strategy.
Personally, I dismiss the notion that just because someone has written a few informative articles they should be positioned as an expert, unless of course they have a PhD on the subject. With that said, quality content that actually captivates a visitor is extremely valuable as it has the potential to increase the stickiness of a web site. I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing when people hang around to peruse your cache of blog posts because they find the content interesting. Not only does that increase the likelihood they’ll come back, chances are they might even tell a friend. A good bit of content that is informative, relevant to your business, and easy to read perhaps won’t earn you the label of expert, but it could turn you into a credible source that’s trusted by your readers [customers] and consistently recognized by the search engines. That translates into good news for traffic and business.
Fresh content and more of it can also benefit an eCommerce site from day one, and a new site can even get ahead of the curve by not only producing meaningful content, but also by supplementing with a blog. The reason being, more content means more pages for search engines to crawl and then index, and with more relevant content and keyword coverage it’s more likely search engines will start to pay closer attention.
Of course content alone won’t guarantee positive gains when it comes to earning recognition. In talking about relevant content it occasionally goes unsaid that in order to generate impact, the writing needs to be targeted not only at potential clients and customers, but also at search engines. Keyword incorporation, links, meta-tags, formatting, and distribution all serve to support and add strength to the written word. Along the same lines, good content may entice another business to link to specific pages on your site, which again strengthens your credibility when people are looking for products or information, and helps improve your standing with Google, Yahoo and the others.
The use of content in a business strategy has a relatively strong foothold when it comes to making gains in SEO, not just for eCommerce sites, but for anyone competing to get better organic page ranking. But in the broad scope of today’s information sharing craze, content can be created by anyone with access to the Internet. Whether much of it is useful information or not can be a discussion left for another post, but I couldn’t agree more that there’s a stark difference between creating and sharing quality content with a strategy, and just writing content because it’s assumed to be important. The first can be a great benefit, and the other could be rendered useless fodder.
Let me say this post is not an act of self-preservation. Although I’m elated to write about writing, it’s mostly coincidental that someone gets to use such a practical medium to highlight the importance of their work. For that, I consider myself lucky.
So trust me, I’m a writer, and I recommend you to put some emphasis on web page content.
Jared Matkin is a staff writer for HotWax Media with a background in PR, Branding and Marketing. He’s also a light-hearted and an opinionated character who will join other HotWax Media employees and advisers in periodically posting his thoughts on topics ranging from enterprise eCommerce to business and technology.
