Whether you’re managing a team of content writers or are a writer yourself, the chances are you’ve clicked on this post because you’re interested in how to include more useful content on your website. Especially when having more useful content = a higher chance of search engines finding, and importantly ranking, your business.
In theory, the more pages your site has, the more opportunities it has to rank for new terms. There is a caveat to this however, as having 100 different pages of thin, or poorly targeted content is much less effective than 50 well-thought-out pages. So, the real questions are, how do we add more content without adding clutter? And how do we add more valuable content?
We’ll look at some of the different ways you can incorporate new content into your website, that’s useful for your audience. If it’s useful to your audience and it’s written well, it means it’s also useful to Google, so you have the best chances of it getting noticed by the search engines.
We know that Google feasts on words. It uses them to determine relevance when it comes to indexing sites. The more information you can give the search engine, the better your chances of ranking for your targeted terms (assuming your content is written well and includes your target keywords of course).
With each page being an individual entity able to earn its own rankings, your search engine visibility can be increased by adding more pages, but more pages of quality content. So how exactly can you expand your site in an effective way?
A blog or news section
This is probably the most commonly used method for boosting site content. An integrated blog or news section allows you to provide useful updates, share industry information and address visitors directly. It’s also a great way of improving site wide SEO.
Each blog post becomes a new page on your site. It provides fresh opportunities to earn links and attract targeted traffic. It also allows you to share links across your site, providing an opportunity to strengthen and divert visitors to your real money pages.
The content itself can be a blend of company news, industry updates, and keyword-targeted content based on research. We recommend ensuring you do include plenty of posts about topics your target market are talking about or asking questions around, as this is incredibly helpful to your audience, and Google loves effective problem-solving content. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner and Answer The Public can really help you identify what’s being searched for.
Buyer’s guides / advice section
By providing additional resources such as buyer’s guides, you’ve identified a way to not only give your visitors extra information that will help inform their decision to buy, but also a handy way to improve your search visibility. Research what questions typical customers are asking and ensure that you target a handful of relevant keywords for each guide. These sections tend to be permanently expandable, allowing you to update as new products and services become available, and in turn, targeting more keywords in the future too.
Whilst you don’t want to get too carried away, expansion of a buyer’s guide or advice section is largely driven by your resources and available subjects. Including tenuous guides of little value won’t reflect well on the site and will do little to encourage visitors landing here to investigate further. So always try to ensure that the content you include adds value.
FAQ section
A common feature on many sites, the FAQ section allows you to address the questions that your visitors have and develop your content. Again, you don’t want to find yourself answering obscure queries for the sake of an extra page; however, as your site and services develop so too can your FAQs.
Build yourself a useful resource and ensure that you’re helping your visitors, not just yourself.
So, there you have it, three straightforward ways to expand your site without devaluing it. By ensuring that you maintain relevance and don’t just add a page for the sake of gaining a ranking for a new term, you can help your site improve as well as grow.
Make sure that your money pages don’t fall off the radar entirely though. New rankings aren’t quite as beneficial if your main search terms start slipping. Freshening things up on your key pages can help to get them re-indexed and improve focus on the keywords they’re targeting.
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