You know you’ve got a great product, but how do you let the rest of the world know that too?
You build a website, of course, to explain why your product is so great. You do your research to find the best ways to sell goods and services on the Internet.
But all you find is a lot of contradictory information about online marketing. Half the web seems to say you need to apply all the tricks of search engine optimization, while the other half says you should focus on content to get your product noticed.
Search engines will certainly be a major source of traffic to your site, which makes it easy to see why search engine optimization is important. But, while employing the whole range of search engine optimization techniques might bring you visitors, all those potential customers will soon leave if all they find are pages stuffed with irrelevant keywords.
So, if search engine optimization and providing useful content both have their advantages, where should you concentrate your efforts?
The benefits of search engine optimization
Search engine robots crawl over your webpages gathering information about your site.
You can use many search engine optimization methods to direct these bots to the keywords and phrases on your pages and make the search engines aware of your content.
The search engines log this information, and when someone searches for keywords that occur often in your text, they will be directed to your site.
It doesn’t have to cost a lot to apply search engine optimization to your website, and it can work for you 24 hours a day.
The benefits of useful content
One of the great advantages of having a website in the first place is that people can find all the information about your product or service at any time. You don’t have to pay sales staff to cold call or set up a consumer service department to answer customer queries.
Your website, therefore, has to contain the right information. Your pages have to answer most, if not all, of the questions a customer might ask. If your customers cannot find the details they’re looking for, they will quickly go elsewhere. They will click on the second link the search engine provided, and then the third, and so on, till they find what they’re looking for. All that effort put into search engine optimization to make sure you appeared at the top of the search results will be wasted.
In other words, your content has to be useful to your customers, and it has to be relevant.
You don’t need to choose
The obvious answer is to apply search engine optimization techniques to a website full of useful content.
But that would appear to be easier said than done.
Many companies offer either search engine optimization or webpage content. Very few offer both.
The key to providing content that will serve your customers and search engine robots is simply to practice. Work on trying to naturally introduce relevant keywords into the right places in the text to give your customers the information they’re looking for.
Uniting useful content with proper search engine optimization can help you get to the top of the search results and keep your customers on the page when they arrive.