The Secret of Content Rich Documents

If you run an online shop, it is tempting to rely heavily on the pictures and imagery of the products to do the selling. But without any text, search engines will not know what they can recommend your page for, and nobody will even see them!

Descriptive Text and Page Titles

Let’s suppose you sell hats, getting to the top of Google for this phrase by itself will be difficult, and probably not all that helpful. Most searchers will already have an idea of the product they want (even if they may not have included it in their search query). If you win the click for ‘hats’, many of those clicks will be hard to keep because the user might be looking for a particular type of hat which you may not even stock! If too many people leave quickly (‘bounce’) this will start to have a negative impact on your websites rank.

By including a more detailed description, you can expect your pages to rank for more specific searches which will not only satisfy the users search, but will also be more likely to convert into a sale! Do you sell ‘wool hats’? Have you talked about the colour or design? Is there a clothing label or designer brand that has a strong identity which you could mention? Are they suitable for special occasions which you could spend a few sentences talking about? Do you stock party hats or fancy dress hats? Even the simplest product deserves a good description. If you cannot easily include the text with the product, perhaps you could have a separate series of information or help pages which link directly through to your product? It will help the search engines find a better search phrase that will bring you traffic. Remember :- if you don’t include the detail, you won’t be included in the search!

Giving Your Audience Helpful Information

Google’s job evolves around recommending websites that searchers will find useful. If your industry is quite competitive and you are finding it difficult to generate traffic, there are several neat ways you can get around this. Google only has 10 top spots, so it must choose the 10 most useful sites for each phrase. By improving the quality of information your website provides, you will be improving the overall performance of your site. Maybe you could include product reviews, advice or how-tos. Perhaps you could get users involved in discussing the product? Does it have a fan base you could somehow utilise? Would  Social Media be the way to tap into this traffic reservoir? If you have any informative PDF documents already (perhaps technical specifications, help manuals or product information pamphlets), it would be worth making those available on your site. Google will happily index these exactly like it reads regular web pages and this extra content will count in your favour.

Being Aware of Trending Topics

All sorts of interesting factors affect what people talk and write about. The Internet is just like other mediums – any big stories in the news headlines will stimulate search and readers. Is there some way you could utilise this? If you have a news or blog section you can use this to promote yourself. Because blogs are indexed sooner, you will find these more responsive and able to respond to sudden changes in peoples search habits.

In a nutshell, Google will reward you for including any information your visitors might find useful. As an expert in your industry, only you truly understand your potential customer base. Consider your competitor sites and ask yourself what you could do better!

Understanding Your Audience Through Keywords

When I’m sat at home watching TV, the advertiser doesn’t know me from Geoff. I’m only here because the scheduled program was of some interest. Outside of this, potential advertisers know very little about me. This is where the Web is utterly different. Each visitor who lands on your page, came from somewhere. Think about it: If they came from a search engine, then we know their intentions will lie behind the search terms they entered into Google. If they followed a link, then it is likely they saw something on the referring site which led them to believe we can help them out. We already understand something about their desires and purpose and by applying just a little tracking data we might be able to better understand what really makes them tick.

Using Google Analytics to Guide Page Structure

So what does this have to do with page structure, SEO and how you break up your content? Well, I like to imagine each page as an island. While they may share a common purpose and phrases, each will deal with a slightly different topic and can therefore be used to target different searches. Each page needs to be targeted towards a particular audience. Lets suppose you are a plumber who performs everything from central heating to plumbing repair and boiler installation. It would be very tempting to lump a all this information together under a general page ‘services’ which might include lists of statements.  By simply breaking up the different services across pages, and padding the content out with text you will have more room to optimise each page for variations on themes around their target optimisation phrases and this will allow you to deliver highly relevant content, which in turn will improve your bounce rate and therefore the success of your SEO as a whole.

Identifying Content That Works for Your SEO

Looking through your Google Analytic data for low bounce rate phrases people found you for will help you work out which visitors were receptive to your content after entering their search terms. You might refine the optimisation of each page to remove or rephrase terms that have a high bounce. One or two bounces is quite normal, but if you’ve had five or ten visits and have a bounce rate over 75%, this might be caused by optimised search terms that are either slightly ambiguous or perhaps a little vague. It might even be nothing wrong with the content itself, but simply the message includes too much information that is not relevant to your search visitor, who might wrongly conclude you could not satisfy their need because they simply didn’t read far enough down the page! If you add content to the site regularly, keeping track of your tracking data will also help you identify demand for a particular topic and allow you to pitch information you know will work.

Deciding When a New Page Will Help Your SEO

The questions to ask yourself are surprisingly straight forward: “What type of audience is this message aimed at?”, “What will this audience be looking for?” and “What sort of action do I wish to encourage from each type of visitor once they find this page?”. If you allow these questions to govern the structure of your site, you will never go far wrong. If content is king, then how you divide up your Kingdom will determine how effectively each page can work together and will improve the overall quality of your SEO.