28 March, 2023
Bev Herscovitch, Copywriter at Clash Creative
You’ve spent hours upon hours researching all of the critical elements of your business — from competitor websites with their primary messages and styles to the core features and benefits of your products or services. You’ve meticulously written out pages of content, delivering powerful messaging that is ready to sell your goods or solutions like hotcakes. You’ve spent what feels like decades watching YouTube videos and learning how to use website design templates (or you gave up and hired someone on Upwork or Fiverr) to get a beautiful, user-friendly, and functional website ready to publish.
Then you hit the publish button and feel a massive sense of relief. Building a website is a huge project, and you did it! Months later, it’s finally done. Now, you just need to wait for the traffic to start rolling in. It’s that simple right?
Not quite.
Days go by and it’s just… crickets! Where are the eager buyers in need of your products or services?
Business websites can be powerful virtual portfolios highlighting your value to your target audience. However, you will miss that opportunity if you don’t intentionally plan your content to reflect search engine optimization (SEO) best practices.
In this article, we teach you everything you need to know about content development for SEO, so you can create a solid website that reaches your business goals. SEO operates as your business’ secret weapon, allowing you to drive traffic to your products and services while creating a user-friendly and engaging experience for your community.
It’s also a service we happen to offer (if you are ready to book a call now, the button is below this blog). We want to make sure business leaders like you understand how important it is.
Search Engine Optimization Explained
SEO means upgrading your website to improve how your business ranks in search results. Primarily, most people’s go-to search engine is Google. SEO involves revamping your website’s content, using tactics like keyword research and link building to appeal to Google’s algorithm.
What is Content Development for SEO?
Optimizing your content goes deeper than making technical changes to your website’s back end. Content development for SEO means taking a strategic approach to structuring your content and writing your copy.
When creating content with SEO in mind, you should use audience research to keep the bigger picture in mind and naturally work common keywords into your copy and headings that pertain to your industry and expertise.
Beyond your static webpage copy, content development for SEO also requires producing other dynamic formats, like blog articles, videos, and infographics. That way, your website offers fresh content that increases visibility and backlink opportunities.
Why Does It Matter?
In our digital age, the Google algorithm can make or break your website and its traffic, and ultimately your business’ ability to succeed. When you create SEO-friendly content and make this approach the foundation of your content marketing strategy, your website copy will reflect your desired customer’s search intent. Search engines will then have an easier time surfacing your business as the answer to their problem.
What Are the Benefits?
Effective SEO content can massively transform the success of your business’ digital presence by:
1. Increasing Your Rank in Search Engines
SEO best practices allow you to create pages that provide concise messages, making it easier for the Google algorithm to categorize your website and rank it higher in search results.
2. Driving Traffic to Your Site
An SEO-optimized website will bring more organic and relevant traffic to your site so you can more easily connect with your target customers. This will improve your bounce rate, increase your session duration, and, most importantly, generate sales.
3. Increasing Your Brand Awareness
By creating multiple SEO-optimized landing pages around specific topics, your website can appear in search results for various keywords, giving you more opportunities to increase your visibility.
SEO will also enable more consistent branding, encouraging you to infuse your content with your brand values and key messages to increase awareness with your potential customers.
4. Building Trust With Your Audience
Your copy will instinctively reflect your target audience’s needs when you prioritize keyword-rich content. Your website will provide valuable information that keeps your customers invested while portraying a professional and confident image, cementing your credibility in your industry.
The Return on Investment
The most popular search engine, Google, brings in roughly 90,460 searches per second, with 33.9% of internet users discovering brands through search and 53.1% researching brands through search engines.
According to a HubSpot study, businesses with a blog on their website experience 55% more visitors, receive 97% more inbound links, and experience an increase of 434% for indexed pages.
Given the common use of Google for commercial purposes, content development for SEO will help maximize your marketing budget, providing your business with a significant return on investment (ROI) and many opportunities to attract your ideal customer.
SEO can also lower your costs in acquiring new customers since your published content continues to drive traffic to your website as time goes on.
Tips to Help You Create Content for SEO
Not sure where to get started? Our expert marketing team has great advice on producing original and well-performing SEO-optimized content:
- Conduct keyword research to strategically place high-value keywords in your text. Make sure that you don’t stuff in too many keywords though! Otherwise, your content will seem robotic to your reader, and Google will likely downrank your website.
- Incorporate high-quality links in your copy, including internal and external sources, to show search engines that your content is reliable and well-researched.
- Refresh old content on your website. This can make a massive difference in your results. Regularly reviewing and reimagining your content marketing strategy to reflect changing SEO best practices is critical, particularly with generative AI shifting what’s possible for search engine algorithms.
- Build customer personas to streamline keyword research when crafting SEO-optimized content. Luckily, we offer persona building as part of our Branding solutions at Clash Creative. Our positioning experts can help you create an ideal client profile to clarify your target customer and ensure your SEO effectively speaks to them.
Do You Need Content Development for SEO?
Given the many benefits that SEO-optimized content can bring, your business should prioritize SEO if you want to see increased results from your marketing efforts.
When Google ranks websites, it looks at a site’s content as a critical factor in influencing the algorithm’s decisions. If you want your website to serve as a tool for building authority in your industry and increasing engagement from your target audience, it is essential to upgrade your website to meet this demand.
Let’s Get You Ranking
Executing an SEO strategy can be a time-consuming and complex process. Without the appropriate expertise, it is easy to get “lost in the weeds” and struggle to determine the best path forward to ensure your business is seen by the right people. As a result, you will miss out on opportunities to make valuable connections that translate to sales, reducing your business’ potential to succeed in our digital era.
Now imagine, you called Clash Creative before you spent hours of valuable time researching your competitors and writing content for your website. The Clash Creative team did all of the necessary research for you, while also spending time learning all of the amazing features and benefits of your products or services. They wrote engaging, SEO-friendly, and benefit-driven copy with your target audience and product personas in mind. Then their design team created a beautiful and user-friendly website, optimizing everything for SEO along the way.
Now, your website has been published for a few months, and with your lively blog and social media strategy also in full swing, the traffic is pouring in.
A few more months go by, and you notice you are now ranking on the first page of Google for some of the keywords you wanted to target (we did this for a client, and you can read the case study here)!
Seeing these results, you feel pretty great about your investment in SEO and content marketing. Moreover, you are so glad you didn’t spend needless hours trying to do it all yourself.
Unfortunately, you don’t have much time to sit back and celebrate because you are way too busy with new business coming in the door! Now it’s time to grow your team and scale, with Clash Creative ready to jump in wherever you need marketing support along the way.
Do you need Comprehensive SEO and Content Marketing services to optimize your website’s content for better traffic and conversions? Book a call with us today to find out how we can help.
Copywriter at Clash Creative
