Tim Barrie: That’s a really good question.
So, let me repeat the question to get it right.
These two things you’re basically asking, one is how much content is enough,
how any pages do you need to add to the website, right?
And the second one is how you come up with all these ideas for different pages on website.
Yeah, yeah.
Thanks.
So we’re going to talk about then is content.
So, the best way I think there is to think about a website in terms of content and why
you need to write more content is thinking about it in terms of the way most small business
owners initially view a website and mistake they make and a better way of thinking about
the website.
So let's step back a little bit and go to basics.
Okay.
Most small business owners will are…and I’m sure there's some people here that are
going to resonate with this, you think, ah…
I've got to have of kind of a website, I've got to figure out how to do that.
You’re going to find somebody to do the website for you and they’re going to build
the website, you’re going to think about, okay I'm going to describe my company this
way, and you’re going to put some stuff on there.
You’re going to get it all built, make it look pretty, and you’re done.
And that, you know, going back ten years that amount of worked, but the problem is, what
you basically created… actually there’s nothing wrong with that… but you've got
you’re going to understand what you doing, which is when you do that, you’re creating
a brochure for your company on the web.
And that can work quite well if your only priority is to be able to send people who
already know who you are, who already contacted you, maybe you’ve given them business card,
and you’re sending them to your website.
you’ll say: “Go to my website.
It shows my business and I have a website.
And you can make a list of your products so they can see what other things you do, and
why they should work with you.
That’s okay.
However, if your goal is to be visible on the web, and to rank in the competitive environment
of the online world, you’re going to be competing with a number of other companies
in your location, in your city, or suburb, and what you want to do is you want to be
at the top of that page…magic page 1 in Google.
What Google does is it rewards the website that has the most interaction with clients.
The That's 'stickiest' is the term.
In other words, assuming a client or a searcher finds your website because he typed in, not
the company name, but the key phrase of the service they’re looking for.
If they then go on that website and they’re staying on it and don’t go back to the search
engine looking for more, that’s a signal to Google that your website has fulfilled
the requirement of the individual searchers.
Now, typically the way that’s achieved, is by having some content on there that causes
people to scroll down the page, or to click on a link, or engages with that user in some
way.
Now, the most commonly asked question on that point is: “what if I just want people to
call me?” and that’s okay because if somebody does a search, finds your website, sees the
phone number, and picks up the phone and calls you, they haven’t bounced, they haven’t
left the website immediately, and they haven’t gone back to searching, so that’s okay.
The problem is, when you get a website that is very light in content, somebody clicks
on it, and it doesn’t really do what they want, so they go back, and they continue to
search.
If that happens, that’s a negative indicator to the search engine, so it’s true for Google,
it’s true for Bing, it’s true for Yahoo, and other search engines.
If there is that negative signal, then you’re going to get negative points, which is going
to push you down in the rankings compared to another site that does engage with the
visitor.
So the reason for your content, there are two reasons.
One is so that Google, Google’s algorithm can analyze your site and learn what it’s
about.
Is it about the key phrases somebody is searching on.
Bear in mind you'll have much have 50 hundred, 200 different key phrases for any given market,
so you've got to have lots of different content covering all that key phrases if you want
to be visible for all those different key phrases.
And what you’ve also got to do the site sticky, in other words, it’s got to engage
the visitor in some way.
Make them want to call immediately, or click on something and learn something.
And typically, the best technique for dong that is to add useful information to a website.
So, how much you need to add, how much useful information you need to add is of proportional
to the number of key words that you want to be visible for, and it’s proportional to
your competitors.
So, if your competitor has more useful interesting content on their site than you do, then you
need to have bit more than they do in order to out rank them and you need to that much
stickier than the competitors.
So how many pages isn’t really, there’s no set number, 10 pages, 50 pages, 200 pages..it’s
more than your competitor.
And the content, but it’s no good to put a bunch of garbage on there.
What you got to do is your content should be interesting enough to make the user read
it, click on it, learn something from it, or call you.
Calling is okay too.
There are lots of techniques for doing that.
But the best way to think about how you can add more content to your website is to think
about the things clients typically ask you.
So when somebody calls you on the phone, every time you have conversation with a client and
explain something to them, that’s your content.
So the best thing you can possibly do is record your phone conversations so that you can turn
that into a “here’s the question, here’s the author.”
And that’s the page, or blog post.
Depending on whether it’s kind of newsy for the blog post, or its core informational
and it’s a page on your website.
One of the most, one of the best techniques I’ve seen that works very well for a local
business for creating content is to do features on your clients.
And that can be, so if for example, you’re a specialist or a builder, and you’re building
something for a client, that story of why did they want that sun room or why do they
want that wine cellar, or what motivated them, what was interesting, what was the site like
before, what was the room like before, pictures of it?
How did you go about designing it.
Was their sketch, pictures of it, this is what it like before?
These are the different things we had to do to this area, and look how beautiful it is
and what the customer think of it?
Pictures, one of the most compelling things you can possibly do, it's akin to a testimonial,
is if you build something physical for a client, then have a pictures of them proudly standing.
I love y wine cellar, or I love my sunroom.
Or I love my kitchen.
Reorganization, or basement remodeling or whatever it is that you’ve done.
Well that’s my house, and I have new siding on it.
And that picture is much much better than a picture that just shows a picture of a house
with the changes on it because it’s like a testimonial and you’re showing a happy
client.
And you’re going to write up that story of what did you do, how did you do it, what
materials did you use, why did you use those materials, what features did you build in
it and so on.
Now these are great examples of when you’re delivering a service, that’s physical, so
not all services that people provide are physical, so for example you are an attorney and you’re
doing some kind of legal work for a client, you can do the same thing, you don’t have
to give away key issues, legal issues, but you've got to get permission from the client.
But you can still talk about, here's a business and what they want to incorporate, what were
they thinking of.
Where they going to incorporate from day one or were they thinking about an LLC, what was
in their mind, what is it they’re trying to achieve with their business?
You can do a write up on the whole thing, and now that they are incorporated this is
what their business looks like, isn’t it cool?
And you’ve just done your client a favor when you do that type of client write up because
you’re promoting them.
You can send them links to their website within that, it doesn’t hurt you in any way to
send them links, but helps them, so you can provide a service to help your clients.
But that's an enormous amount of content.
Every single time you get a client buy something from you , or work with you to achieve some
end, you’ve got a story of, what were they thinking, how did we arrive at the solution,
or what does the solution look like?
Each one of those stories can be optimized for that service which is your keyword, and
it can be optimized for a specific location.
The location of the business, if your business is B2B, the location of where that business
is.
So you then optimize the keyword in their location.
If you got 50 clients and there're in there, all in different locations in different parts
in the city, or in different cities around you, perfect!
That'll increase your visibility hugely.
Same thing if you've got a physical product.
The location and the service, keyword location, because 1 in 5 searches now on the web have
local intent.
Meaning, there'll put some kind of qualifier to say, "I’m looking for somebody locally
to me to provide this service.
Most people if they’re looking for an attorney for example, aren’t going to do a national
search.
If I’m from California, then I’m not going to look for an attorney in New York.
So they're going to look for an attorney in California or in the city that they’re in.
And someone, if they’re looking for a local builder, that’s what they’re going to
do.
There’s almost an endless amount because every client that you get, I’m sure you
agree, when you have conversation with them, is unique.
They’re going to ask similar questions.
But you can redo the questions, phrasing it slightly differently, and the answer and the
conversation you had with the client on each one, the trick is to track it.
The trick is some kind of mechanism, as part of your regular business process for interacting
with clients so that you keep track of all of these different conversations.
But I guarantee you, if you do a page for each client, you’ll have hundreds of pages
over time, and you’ll have huge deep content that will be very interesting to somebody
else.
Because whatever the question is, whatever the solution is, that that particular client
wanted, it’s going to resonate with somebody out there, so you have a list of all these
types of services that you provide or from the client point of view.
And that’s an addition to the core pages that you create, that at a high level describe
what your service is.
So it’s not only is it adding more content, but it’s making it real because you’re
talking about different clients and different solutions.
So that’s by far one of the best techniques I’ve seen and we’ve implemented for increasing
the amount of content, highly interesting content, content that engages with the clients
and content that enables us to optimize and help the clients be much much more visible
in the search engines for tons of key phrases in their local market.