What we have is a lot of tricks up our sleeve, but web optimization isn’t magic. Creating a successful website takes time and expertise. In this series, we’re looking at the many tasks and techniques that get results for our clients.
Content is the information provided on your website using text and images. Appropriately optimized content is ranked higher in the search engines, attracts more visitors to your site, and improves your return on investment.
Quality
Quality content goes beyond accurate descriptions of your product or service. Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines tell us that they prioritize Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google is looking for content that is interesting and informative for human viewers, and not an attempt to manipulate their algorithms.
They want to see original text, cohesiveness and logic between pages, and well-written, factual information. Unique examples and customer reviews add weight.
Readability
Writing for the web is different than for other platforms, and may not get the attention it once did. You can’t cram too much content into a space, the language needs to be easy to scan, and relevant images or videos help to make it all more easily understood. Of course, error free and properly formatted content is the baseline.
Content Freshness
You don’t have to rewrite your entire website on the regular, but you do need to change things up every few months to keep it “fresh.” This tells the search engines that your content is still relevant, and it tells viewers that there’s a reason for them to revisit.
User Intent Alignment
There are four types of search intent, and search engines want to make sure that they are considering intent in their results. Informational intent means the user wants to learn about a particular topic. Transactional intent means they want to make a purchase or pay a bill. Navigational intent means that the user is looking for a particular web site; and, Commercial intent means the user is researching a type of product or service to help them make a decision.
The purpose and focus of your site need to clearly address one of these user intents, or separate them obviously on different pages. For example, one a shopping page, you could have different styles of wool sweaters, and on another page, you could have an article about the characteristics of wool, like it’s warmth.
To sum up, content optimization ensures high-quality, user-focused, and easy to understand information that aligns with the viewer’s intent.
We Build Websites That Work
Speaking of content optimization, see how we added expertise and authoritativeness to Warvik Marine’s website, increasing inquiries and consultation requests.
