Web Content: When in Doubt, Follow the Big Dogs
Building your business website may have taken quite a bite out of your marketing budget. Now that it’s up, running properly, and looking so professional, many business owners fail to take the next logical step in launching a successful marketing plan: web content.
Web content, that all important word lineup potential customers scan when they click on your site. Remember the key word here; professional. You spent all that money to give the illusion of a successful, established company; even though you may be brokering out of your Uncle’s garage. So why are you filling your site with generic, canned fluff that no one wants to read?
The initial design of your site causes an immediate reaction in your client’s mind that lasts about one hundredth of a millisecond. It either looks professional or it doesn’t, simple as that. If your site comes across as tacky and is slow loading or missing images, guess what? The attention span leaves just as quickly as it arrived and you get a “bounce.” What is a bounce? It’s that thing that happens when your potential client takes one look at your home page, decides that he need not waste another second of his life on it, and clicks right back off. This is NOT what you are after.
Content is just as important as web design. If you have everything right, a natural progression will take place. Mental web design assessment will lead to a quick scan of article titles. This should lead to a chosen piece of content being read and hopefully a click-through to a second and third page, if enough interest has been generated.
Web content is part of the overall strategic planning of your site. The content needs to make sense. It needs to be there for a reason, it needs to be intelligent, relevant, and compelling. Most of all, it has to eventually lead your reader somewhere. If your site is filled with generic, flat content or worse yet, a poorly regurgitated version of someone else’s article, you are going to be the one who loses in the end.
Several years ago, The Financial Times announced that it had done a house cleaning and sold off several of it’s publications. Why? According to Stephen Hill, CEO for Pearson’s FT Group, “Our newspapers, magazines and online services are now all focused on what we do best — providing our customers with the very best business and financial news, comment, analysis and data.” Wow! That’s a mouthful. The Financial Times is specializing their web content. The niche is getting “niche-ier”
If The Financial Times, a publisher with a remarkable reputation, is specializing their content, what does that say for the little guys? If Yahoo had to reshape its portal strategy for profitability, why do we think that we can fill our website with any old sludge and attract the fickle attention of the masses?
Content is king. If your business is on the web you are going to have to commit to publishing relevant, quality content on a consistent basis. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be on the web. Your site will just stagnate and become a huge waste of time for all involved.
So how much content should you provide and what kind? The basic rule is this: Whatever your niche is, keep it as focused as possible. Put the side-blinders on and don’t deviate. People need a lot of content, but that doesn’t mean that you should provide all of it. Websites can get carried away with an ‘everything you ever wanted to know about everything’ approach.
If a website is too cluttered with a broad range of information, then the really important stuff can get lost. Lawn fertilizer information is far from breaking news, but when you need it you really need it. Potential customers may be interested in general articles about your industry, but if it’s product features and instructions they’re after, they need to be able to get to them quickly.
The bottom line is this: If you want to be here today and here tomorrow, model your website after the leaders, not the losers.
Leave a Reply