For any new business in today’s world, a website is vital to gaining new customers, and with every new website comes search engine optimisation (SEO) which is equally important. If your website is not properly optimised for search engines, then you could fall behind in the searches, no one will be able to find you and if no one can find you, this mean no sales, no customers, no business – and nobody wants that!
In our previous blog, we discussed the importance of keywords and top tips on how to pick them. In our latest blog we will discuss the next step in starting a new website, which is content, and of course how best to optimise it for SEO!
Content is very important when it comes to your website as this is what visitors will look at when browsing your website and is a big element when determining how you rank in search engines.

When talking about content, we are talking about everything you publish on your website, such as blog posts, news articles, reports, FAQs, and web page content. Anything that you have written and put on your website is your content.

As you should have your keywords chosen before you start writing content, it will be easier to write up content as you will have subjects to write about. However, though it is important to have keywords, it is far more important to always keep your visitors in mind first before keywords. If you focus too heavily on keywords, your website could be seen as spammy, you could be penalised in search engines and visitors will likely click off and not return.

So, where to start?

As well as keywords, there are other elements you need to think about when writing content.

1. Relevant: this one seems like a no-brainer but you may be surprised how many companies’ content is irrelevant to their brand. Remember who is visiting your website and why, and make sure the information links back to your brand.
2. Quality: while the topic needs to be relevant, you also need to make sure the content is of high quality. Is the information good? Is the spelling and grammar correct? All of these are taken into account. Check out this useful blog on what Google deems high quality.
3. Length: websites can miss out on rankings because the word count is low. As most search engines focus on good content, they tend to favour websites with more content. Websites with low word count or with a low text-to-html ratio can be ranked lower. It is always good to check your coding is valid, and then check if you can add relevant content. We usually suggest a 350 minimum word count for each post.
4. Interlink: when adding content is is good to link to other places on your website that are relevant to that content. For example, in this post we linked to our previous blog on SEO. Interlinking is great because:
   • Helps guide a visitor through your website more seamlessly, giving a better user experience
   • Can potentially lower bounce rate as the visitor will have another place to click through to rather than click out
   • Build links for your website and helps search engines determine what content is on that particular page

Once all the content is in place, search engines will crawl your website to check all the information is okay, and then check what it is about and decide how it will rank for each keyword.

It is good to have a news section or blog as well so that visitors have more information to look through and so that search engines have more pages to determine ranking in search engines. More good content can also result in more visitors, shares or link building in other articles, which can help towards you rankings.

For some extra tips on content marketing, check our previous blog here.