Building Content for your Clients

Search engine marketing is constantly evolving. An ongoing part of this evolution is the blurring of the line between creating content for the client, and creating content to attract the client. The most obvious sector herein is creating content for the exclusive goal of attracting the search engines. The idea being that if the web site is more attractive to the search engines – they have more of the content they are looking for, then the search engines will send more traffic, and those people might buy more.

Many businesses online will benefit when their pages perform well in the search engines, and that success must be respected, so that they do not to fall into the trap of exclusively creating pages for search engines rather than for customers. The person responsible for marketing in any business has to be concerned, first and foremost, about strategic marketing decisions which increase the client base in the long, and the short term.

Creating content for the search engines which has little meaningful content for a person will only achieve half the real goal. The marketer will be able to claim, with some measure of conviction, that they built a campaign which resulted in more potential clients coming to look at the business. It then falls on the sales department why more of these prospects did not convert. Unfortunately, while the business may have attracted more viewers, the marketing campaign did not properly target potential clients, and did not offer easy ways for the traffic it did attract to convert. The campaign did not include any sense of urgency around making a purchase.

When creating content online, and planning this content from a marketing perspective, don’t forget your clients. They pay the bills, and they put the money into the marketing campaign. Build content from the perspective of what the end user will want to know. Build separate pages for each distinct question you are answering, or for each aspect of a strategy.

Write the content naturally, and then go back over it, tighten up the language, and put the right emphasis on the key terms you want emphasized to your clients. Doing this right will mean the search engines will get the message too. When the document is done, add links in the text to other related areas of the web site. Link back from those pages too where logical and possible. These internal links will help your visitors; If they don’t understand what you are referring to, they can click the link and see a standalone section dealing with just that one subject. Search engines work the same way. If the content, and the linked content, doesn’t make sense to a person, it certainly won’t to a search engine.

So when building content for your web site, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. To them, you are the expert in your field, it’s why they have come to your business. If they knew as much as you, or had your contacts, they wouldn’t need you. But they do need you. They need you because you are their trusted resource. If you fulfill that resource need, they will continue to come to you for answers, and when they need a product or service you offer, they come to you to make the purchases. The quickest purchaser to pick up on your wealth of information will be the search engines. They absorb all your knowledge quickly, and when someone asks the search engines where to find something that matches your area of expertise, they recommend your site with confidence. The higher up in the search results your web site ranks for that particular query, the more confident the search engine is that your web site is the right resource from which their client, the searcher, is likely to find the answer to their question.

If you create content properly, and continue to add to it on an ongoing basis, a few things happen. First off, your clients use your web site more. They also use it more and more as a resource, and eventually, as the place from which to purchase products or services. Having a good resource online means they will refer people there more often. At first, many of the referrals will just come to learn information – for education purposes. Eventually though, they will need one of your products or services, and since your web site is their trusted resource, they will contact you, or place an order online. In the meantime, the search engines will note that your web site has significant amounts of content. They will note ongoing activity – new content being added regularly. They will also note that more and more people link to your web site, and use it as a reference tool. They will reward your web site with more potential customers.

At the end of the day, the content you built for your clients, also was the content you built for the search engines. Their needs meshed perfectly, you killed two birds with one stone.