Onsite Content: Are You Making These Mistakes?

There has never been a time when the content of a business’s website has been so important. What with the recent financial crisis and its affect on the market, along with the fact that everyone has less time to do more things, the effectiveness of a website is of paramount importance.

This makes it all the more surprising that so many businesses are still making what are pretty fundamental mistakes with their website content. Many of these businesses have great products or services to offer but their site traffic and conversions are down. Why? Because their content isn’t strong enough.

Back in the early days of the internet, a business’s website only needed to contain the most basic of information and once it had been placed on the server, there was little need to change it too often. Why has this changed over time?

Searchers Knowledge and Skill

Even the most casual of users on the Internet are savvier than we were ten years ago. Plain HTML, slow loading sites, and harsh color schemes are just a few of the things that impact all visitors’ impressions of your website. The world has moved on and now a business’s website is their shop window, therefore all these items need to be taken into account. Just like a physical shop window it needs to entice prospective customers in, it needs to make it instantly clear what the shop sells and it needs to be updated often enough to keep it fresh.

Search Engine Optimization

Throughout the past decade, search engines have increased the factors with which they index, cache, and rank web pages. In the early days of SEO webmasters and web designers were able to have slowly loading pages filled with flash and graphics, hidden internal links, frames, lacking image tags, and heading tags without it causing too many issues with regards to search engine rankings. Today, onsite issues are an important factor in search engine optimization and you should always take notice (not to mention staying on top of trends and changes).

What are a few common mistakes? Let’s examine a few of them:

Not updating the website often enough. A far too common error. If you’re thinking something along the lines of: “I still sell the same products as I did last year, so what’s the point of changing the website?” you certainly won’t be alone. Unfortunately, you will equally certainly be losing ground to your competitors. Just like the main street window display, you need to refresh your site on a regular basis for two key reasons. Firstly, the practical one: if you don’t do this it will become boring and stale and will turn off both new and prospective customers. They will think you’re resting on your laurels and it will be perceived that your business is complacent. Secondly, your competitors will be updating their websites and this will put you well behind in customers’ perception.

Not including a business blog. How else are you going to keep customers informed about your latest offers and thoughts as well as providing useful internal links? We all like to feel involved and this is a great way to achieve this; equally, it’s a great way to avoid having customers feel ignored.

Not making the most of your site’s internal links. The hard work is getting a customer to spend time on your site. Once they have chosen to visit, make it as easy as possible for them to explore and look at other pages. You may have a superb offer from which the customer could really benefit on one of your website’s pages, but if it’s not easy for the customer to find it, then it might as well not be there. They’ll move on to another site where they can move around with the least effort.

Not giving your old content the respect it deserves. Just because you have content on your website that has been there for a while, doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Say you run a CD store and have a guide on your website to the Top 10 all time 1960s albums. You may think that the list holds as true now than it did three years ago and you would be right in the sense of the CDs mentioned. But – and this is where the mistake is often made – that does not mean the content should not be given a spring clean. Why not provide some new links and take a time to review your use of keywords? Think about SEO content by imagining what people would be searching on now that they weren’t three years ago. In the case of 1960s music, the recent movie The Boat That Rocked has brought the music of the era back into the mainstream and many people will want to explore. Use this as a keyword and a whole new generation may be heading to your site.

Avoiding the common mistakes, and understanding the how and why of the changes online will help you develop your onsite content to appeal to your prospective customers, as well as appeal to search engines.

Have you ever made any of the mistakes listed above? How did you remedy them?

About the Author:

Steve Lazuka is the President of content marketing company, Interactive Media, based in Ohio. His company helps clients with their SEO content writing needs, including content marketing and promotion.

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